But not completely. It is quite common to browse a number of SGML documents and reach intuitive conclusions that are inconsitent with the standard. The current working specification for HTML does not faithfully represent contemporary practice as supported by applications such as Mosiac and Lynx. The following is a commentary on the current document in the form of an enumeration of the outstanding issues as I see them. Mainstream All parsers must recognize these features.
Features are mainstream unless otherwise mentioned.
Extra Standard HTML features which may safely be ignored by parsers. It is legal to ignore these, treat the contents as though the tags were not there. Parsers should implement these features as far as possible in order to preserve back-compatibility with previous versions of this specification. On the one hand, authors would like to be certain that the markup they compose will be faithfully represented on the other end. On the other hand, information consumers should be able to filter and format documents as they please.