The recommended usage is
incomplete; it only includes those constructs that are easy to
implement and explain. This section discusses a few more constructs
that allow you to do anything that can legally be done. There are constructs beyond these, but they
can all be reduced to constructs shown here.
An HTML document is a header part followed by a BODY element.
The header part consists of the TITLE, ISINDEX, and NEXTID elements
which each appear zero or one time in any order. (see ISINDEX test, no title test)
The BODY start and end tags may be omitted. They will be inferred by
SGML parsers. "Recommended
Usage" is an example of this. This entity is an example of
explicitly including the BODY tags.
The PLAINTEXT tag signals the end of the HTML text entity, and
the beginning of a non-SGML data entity. (The format of the data
is governed by the MIME text/plain content type.)
See Also:
Header Elements
The title can have an '<' character, as long as it's not followed
by a '/' and a letter. See the
section on SGML delimiters in CDATA.
Body Elements
The normal text content of body elements may include several kinds of
markup.
A comment that you shouldn't see: For copyrights, RCS keywords, etc.
processing instruction: If you've _got_ to
stick TeX macros or something in there, use this. The sample
implementation won't even tell you it's there, though.
Entity References
Entity references are recognized in normal body elements (anyplace
#PCDATA appears in the DTD) and attribute value literals.
See the Entities section of
"Text and Markup" for more details.
The HTML DTD defines the following entities for characters that might
otherwise be parsed as markup:
HTML Entities
- Name
- Definition
- lt
- <
- gt
- >
- amp
- &
- quot"
- "
- apos
- '
ISO Latin-1 Characters
The HTML DTD references the public text
"ISO 8879:1986//ENTITIES Added Latin 1//EN"
to define entities for latin-1 characters, for example Gödel was a
famous mathemetician.
Anchors
Order and Apperance of Attributes
name implied
HREF implied
HREF before name
Quotes In Attribute Values
In order to include quotes in the value of the content-type attribute,
use """ and "'" entity references:
link
to SGMLS software distribution with fancy content-type attribute
Note: Interpretation of Literals
Section 7.9.3 of the SGML standard states
- An attribute value literal is interpreted as an attribute value by
replacing references within it, ignoring Ee and RS, and replacing RE
or SEPCHAR with SPACE.
For the SGML-impared, Ee is Entity End (like EOF); RS is '\n'; RE is
'\r'; SEPCHAR is '\t' and SPACE is ' '.
Since to date there are no HTML attributes containing newlines or
spaces, that is not much of an issue.
@@But replacement of literals is. For one thing, this creates an
interaction between the syntax of URLs and SGML syntax. We could
resolve this issue by removing '&' from the
URL syntax
.
Headings
Six levels of headings are defined:
Level four heading
Another level four heading. It's long. It's only conventional and suggested that lines be less than 72 characters long. It's certainly not specified, defined, or required.
Level five heading
Level six heading
Paragraphs
Normal paragraphs consist of text consisting of words, sentences, and
other stuff.
Line breaks are not significant.
This is still the first
paragraph of this section.
Here's the second paragraph. It's long. It's only conventional and suggested that lines be less than 72 characters long. It's certainly not specified, defined, or required.
A P tag isn't needed between a paragraph and some other element, like
a heading.
Ordered lists
These are for things like lists of steps, where the order is
significant.
- This is the first item of an unordered list.
- This is the second item. It's kinda long, and should wrap around
on most screens.
- This is the third item.
- This is the fourth and final item.
Case of names is not significant: different cases
Case of names is not significant: both lower case
TYPEWRITER
Anything you could put on a typewriter (or an ASCII display
device, more precicesly) can be represented in a TYPEWRITER
element:
Tags: <start> </end>
Entity references: < &
Tables made from tabs:
col 1 col 2 col 3 col 4
1 3 4
2 3 4
1 2 3 4
Plus, you can use hypertext links.
Linebreaks _are_ significant. There should be three blank lines from here
to here.
The ASCII Horizontal Tab (HT) character should be interpreted as the
smallest positive nonzero number of spaces which will leave the number
of characters so far on the line as a multiple of 8. Its use is not
recommended however.
Literal Text Elements
Comment declaration as data follows:
Markup declaration as data follows:
Start tag follows:
tags are fine!
& as long as it's not followed by a letter or '#', it's fine!
is even ok, unless it's followed by a letter or a number.
Tabs in XMP content:
This is literal text with tabs. THESE words
should line up under THESE words.