RFC 1866            Hypertext Markup Language - 2.0        November 1995


   The start symbol of the DTD grammar is HTML, and the productions are
   given in the public text identified by `-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN'
   (9.1, "HTML DTD"). The terminals above parse as:

       HTML
        |
        \-HEAD
        |  |
        |  \-TITLE
        |      |
        |      \-
        |      |
        |      \-"Parsing Example"
        |      |
        |      \-
        |
        \-BODY
          |
          \-P
            |
            \-
            |
            \-"Some text. "
            |
            \-EM
            |  |
            |  \-
            |  |
            |  \-"*wow*"
            |  |
            |  \-
            |
            \-

   Some of the elements are delimited explicitly by tags, while the
   boundaries of others are inferred. The  element contains a
    element and a  element. The  contains ,
   which is explicitly delimited by start- and end-tags.

3.2. HTML Lexical Syntax

   SGML specifies an abstract syntax and a reference concrete syntax.
   Aside from certain quantities and capacities (e.g. the limit on the
   length of a name), all HTML documents use the reference concrete
   syntax. In particular, all markup characters are in the repertoire of
   [ISO-646]. Data characters are drawn from the document character set
   (see 6, "Characters, Words, and Paragraphs").





 
RFC 1866            Hypertext Markup Language - 2.0        November 1995


   A complete discussion of SGML parsing, e.g. the mapping of a sequence
   of characters to a sequence of tags and data, is left to the SGML
   standard[SGML]. This section is only a summary.

3.2.1. Data Characters

   Any sequence of characters that do not constitute markup (see 9.6
   "Delimiter Recognition" of [SGML]) are mapped directly to strings of
   data characters. Some markup also maps to data character strings.
   Numeric character references map to single-character strings, via the
   document character set. Each reference to one of the general entities
   defined in the HTML DTD maps to a single-character string.

   For example,

    abc<def    => "abc","<","def"
    abc<def   => "abc","<","def"

   The terminating semicolon on entity or numeric character references
   is only necessary when the character following the reference would
   otherwise be recognized as part of the name (see 9.4.5 "Reference
   End" in [SGML]).