It's not merely that you need somewhat more than 10 states to detect
elements (as opposed to tags) in order to know, for example, where
font and color settings end. Netscape 7 and Internet Explorer do
various visible things that depends on parsing that can only be done
with some backtracking. A trivial example is that both consider
<!--this--> to be a comment but <!--not-this-- > contrary to
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/intro/sgmltut.html#idx-HTML
Netscape 7 and Internet Explorer consider <!--stuff<and><nonsense-- >
as two tags instead of one comment.
That bug was originally introduced by Netscape and IE then copied it to be
compatible.
The reason the bug exists is that the Netscape guys had sat through too many
comp sci lectures on yacc and LR(1) parsing. They never did clue into the
fact that Goldfarb had never read that stuff and that as a result parsing
SGML with an LR(1) parser is a not-happening proposition.
Phill
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg