DOCBOOK: Re: Linking in DocBook V5.0

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ Bob Stayton <bobs@caldera.com> was heard to say:
| Just for fun I tested nesting <A> elements:
| 
| <A href=foo>Starting <A href=bar>a link</A> and ending</A>
| 
| Netscape and IE5 actually handle this up to first
| closing </A>.  "Starting" goes to foo, and "a link"
| goes to bar.  But the first </A> closes both
| and so "and ending" is not hot text at all.  

That's probably "correct" behavior. Remember that HTML is an *SGML*
application.  That means that the logical structure of a document can
be modified by implied markup (let's be gracious here and grant that
the browers are real SGML applications, they aren't, but let's pretend :-).

A quick peek at the HTML DTD shows that <A> elements are excluded from
themselves, so the start tag for the 'bar' anchor implicitly ends the
'foo' anchor. Then the first </A> closes the 'bar' anchor.

Now, later on, the parser encounters a mismatched end tag and really
ought to complain, but this is a browser and HTML browsers go to great
lengths to recover from errors, so the offending end tag is ignored.

More than anyone wanted to know, I'm sure. :-)

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | just is. And we dance to its
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | music.--Richard Dawkins