Henrik Martensson wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-01-26 at 12:13, leoboiko / gmail.com wrote:
> 
>>Hi.  Why doesn't ERB work with valid XML processing instructions, as
>>suggested by lots of people[1]? Is there any good reason we're stuck
>>with invalid, nonstandard, Microsoft-inspired "<%...%>" tags?  It
>>shouldn't be difficult to allow both syntaxes (someone even made a
>>patch[2]), and .rhtml files could finally be valid XHTML.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> Historical reasons, mostly. HTML started out as inspired by SGML, rather
> than compliant with SGML. The people who built the first web servers
> didn't know much about SGML, and so they reinvented processing
> instructions in an annoyingly incompatible manner. Ever since, web
> frameworks have been built on a solid foundation of
> don't-bother-me-with-the-basics-of-SGML/XML-processing. Quite
> successfully too, which really grates my cheese. :-)

Do you have any references for this?  I'm pretty sure Tim Berners-Lee, 
Marc Andreessen, etc. knew about SGML, and I do not believe that HTML 
ever had PIs.


Also, the xml-dev list is a good place to read varying, but informed, 
opinions on the use of PIs.

For example:

http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200505/msg00159.html

Thanks,


-- 
James Britt