Tags inside themselves??

Stan Newton (newtonjs@vnet.net)
Tue, 16 Aug 1994 10:07:30 -0400

Date: Tue, 16 Aug 1994 10:07:30 -0400
Message-Id: <199408161407.AA24061@char.vnet.net>
To: www-html@www0.cern.ch
From: newtonjs@vnet.net (Stan Newton)
Subject: Tags inside themselves??

I have a new assignment to develop authoring tools for HTML documents and 
have been studying the July 94 draft of the HTML 2.0 specification. This is 
an excellent draft overall but I do several similar questions related to 
tags allowed inside themselves.

The HTML DTD Reference (Level 2) states that BLOCKQUOTE tags are allowed in 
BLOCKQUOTE tags (pg 6-2) but nesting of BLOCKQUOTEs and possible rendering 
is not discussed. The HTML DTD (pg 5-5 & 5-7) defines BLOCKQUOTE as a member 
of the %block Entity and defines the BLOCKQUOTE Element to contain 
%body.content which includes %block. Is this intentional? Can I have 
Blockquotes inside Blockquotes, that is, can Blockquotes be nested?

The HTML DTD Reference (Level 2) states for each of the Highlighting tags 
(B, CITE, etc.) that the tags are allowed inside of themselves. See, for 
example, Bold (pg 6-2). The HTML Level 1 DTD (pg 5-10) defines allowable 
content for %font and %phrase elements in terms of a %phrase.content entity 
definition which includes the %font and %phrase entity definitions, thereby 
placing the tags inside themselves.

Shouldn't each of the Highlighting tags be allowed to include all 
Highlighting tags EXCEPT ITSELF? Since the Highlighting for any specific tag 
should already be on, the appearance of another tag with the same 
Highlighting does nothing and has the potential to confuse some 

Stan Newton
Newton Computing Solutions