>if all clients had editors built in from the start
>(like the *first* browser on the NeXT), it would have been much easier to
>put new structures, meta-information, and navigation tools into
>practice, because editors could make it easy for people to
>create such things and verify the structure.
> Instead, if you ask people today to support meta-information and
>new document structures, a lot of them are going to implement this
>manually...by hand. This is the equivalent of writing with a quill pen!
>If Mosaic (and other clients) had editing capability, we could all be
>in the word-processing age by now.
One of the reasons I keep asking for arbitrary SGML (or perhaps a
reasonably complete subset thereof) be specified is that then, HTML,
HTML+, and whatever other things that are coming along, will all be
handled within the client, without changes (except for perhaps
dowloading DTD's and stylesheets). By not requiring validation, and
not using some nasties (like system entities could possibly be,
OMMITAG, and others), a simple, lightweight, arbitrary SGMl standard
could be defined, and a fast parser/render could be written for it. A
small matter of programming for those with time on their hands...