I meant the variant of HTML that includes object tags and J-Script/VB-Script that has conditional statements and recursion -- which is enough to make it Turing complete. If the precise name of that is DHTML, it's not relevant -- as far as users are concerened it's stuff in web pages that nearly all browsers know how to and will execute and will throw it into a non-terminating computation -- which makes it "HTML" as far as they are concerned. > -----Original Message----- > From: kragenat_private [mailto:kragenat_private] > Sent: Tuesday, August 04, 1998 2:37 PM > To: Paul Leach > Cc: BUGTRAQat_private > Subject: Re: Object tag crashes Internet Explorer 4.0 > > > On Tue, 4 Aug 1998, Paul Leach wrote: > > The possibility of infinite loops and infinite recursion in > HTML has been > > discussed on the lists before. Trying to detect and prevent > them is an > > instance of the "Turing machine halting" problem, and it is > well known among > > computer scientists to be impossible. > > Certainly not. HTML is not Turing-complete. In fact, detecting and > preventing infinite loops and recursion in HTML simply requires > traversing a directed acyclic graph and determining that it is, in > fact, acyclic. This is simple. > > Perhaps you're thinking of DHTML. Or perhaps you're thinking of some > kind of evil, twisted web server that serves up the same page under an > infinite number of different names, each modified to include a frame > reference to that page under a different name. > > Kragen >
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