On the cutting edge (fwd)

[Albert Lunde]

At 10:54 AM 3/15/96, Jon Knight wrote:
>On Fri, 15 Mar 1996, Elizabeth Richards wrote:
>> I am very new to the world of developing web pages and was stunned
>> and dismayed to discover that there is a disagreement regarding
>> whether Netscape HTML codes for tables, etc. Should be used.  The
>> argument being that the codes have not been approved by the HTML
>> standards committe.  If you use them, you may discover in months that
>> your pages are not compatible with other browsers.
>
>Or even right now if you've got the right browser... :-)
>
>> OTH if Netscape dominates the market then do these standards have any
>> force?  Or should we as responsible citizens simply use them to
>> encourage cooperation and discourage a capitalistic driven Internet?
>
>Well, the Netscape developers have said in the past that they're
>committed to implementing HTML 3.0 as soon as they can, so if you use HTML
>3.0 standard tags you should find that Netscape's browsers either work
>with them now or soon will.  Of course its not unknown for software
>companies to tell fibs and go back on promises...

It is important to realize that right now there *IS NOT* an HTML 3.0 standard.

For fairly current information on the standardization of HTML see:

http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/MarkUp.html

There *IS* a specification for HTML 2.0 which is in essentially final form
(subject to correction of errors but with no substantial revisions planned)
which has the been given status of Proposed Standard by the IETF.

The last specfication to bear the name "HTML 3.0" was an Internet Draft
dated March 1995.

The standard "boilerplate" at the from of Internet Drafts notes:

>   This document is an Internet draft. Internet drafts are working
>   documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas
>   and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute
>   working information as Internet drafts.
>
>   Internet Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six
>   months and can be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other documents
>   at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet drafts as reference
>   material or to cite them as other than as "work in progress".

A comment on the page at the URL above, has this to say about the
now-expired HTML 3.0 draft:

>Based upon earlier work on HTML+, proposed extensions to HTML 2.0 to support
>tables, text flow around figures and math.
>Note: The March 1995 HTML 3.0 draft no longer reflects the current views of the
>W3C nor the IETF. The features in that document, however, are being
>implemented, tested, reviewed, refined, and specified in a number of other
> documents.

Basically what happened is that the IETF HTML working group took longer
than originally hoped to produce the HTML 2.0 spec, and as a strategy to
try and get things done, both the HTML and HTTP working groups have been
shifting from producing large monothic documents to producing smaller, more
focused documents.

At this point, some features originally in the HTML 3.0 draft are fairly
far along in a process towards producing a final specification (like
tables), while others like math markup have been given little further
attention and may or may not ever be standardized.

In addition, specifications have been circulated via the IETF or the W3C
for other features (like support for international character sets) that
were not mentioned in the HTML 3.0 draft. There is also a draft for a style
sheet language.

(It's not totally clear right now how much of future standardization work
will be done by the IETF or by the W3C.)

Right now, therefore, the status of the HTML standardization process is
rather complicated. Claimed compliance with HTML 3.0 means different things
to different people, but it is not an assurance of future interoperability.

It's also true that other media types largely unrelated to HTML like
Acrobat documents or Java Applets may largely bypass the HTML
standardization process.

Right now, Netscape and Microsoft are in a similar situation: they both
support a superset of the list of HTML tags in the HTML 2.0 spec (though
not always in a way that strictly complies with that spec ). The additional
tags they support come from various sources.

I think there is a real need for someone knowledgeable about various
software versions and the history of the standards process to do some
"triage" on the list of various extenstions to HTML 2.0 and rate them on
their impact on interoperability as well as on congruence with various
drafts and the SGML standard. (Some markup *is* in newer specifications
like the tables draft, and some appearance of some markup degrades
gracefully if viewed on a browser that doesn't support it, so not all
extensions are equally "bad". )


---
    Albert Lunde                      Albert-Lunde at nwu.edu