Re: lynx-dev lynx and SGML

[Klaus Weide]

On Thu, 14 Jan 1999, David Woolley wrote:
> > Can someone tell me to what extent lynx supports the display of 
> > sgml documents and how much support for sgml is planned for
> > the future? I see no mention of it in the man pages.
> 
> Lynx displays that subset of SGML documents that are valid HTML documents.
> It also displays many documents which purport to be HTML but which are
> not valid SGML and therefore not valid HTML.  NB all valid HTML is also
> SGML.

In addition, one can use Lynx to download SGML documents from servers 
using HTTP, FTP, and so on, and one can have it automatically start a
"real" SGML handler or viewer.

There are also some rules for the MIME types text/x-sgml and text/sgml
(but not application/sgml) hardwired in (in HTInit.c), which effectively
make Lynx treat texts with those types as HTML.  That's probably not very
useful, and maybe it should go away.  OTOH anyone who wants to do
something useful with text/html documents and wants to get at them with
Lynx should have a viewer for those types defined in a mailcap file, which
would override the builtin handling.

> Support for other SGML documents would require style sheet support
> as a pre-requisite and the current industry trend is towards the XML
> subset of SGML in this area, rather than full SGML support (i.e. towards
> self defining elements rather than the use of DTDs).
> 
> The plans for Lynx are the union of the plans of the individual authors.

Well put...

  Klaus

> Are you proposing to become an author and are you planning to provide
> general DTD and style sheet support?