Netscape Beta & Backgrounds

[Albert Lunde]

>I was just about to query the group on this one myself when I decided to
>again read the Release Notes from Netscape.  Seems you have to have quote
>marks around your base href URL in order to get the backgrounds to load.  Your
>base href should look like this:
>
>        <BASE HREF="http://your.url.here">
>
>The Netscape 2.0x versions are very picky about the quote marks when it
>comes to reading URLs it seems.

I think this requirement comes from trying to adhere more closely to the
syntax requirements of SGML. (The HTML specifications are written as
applications of SGML)

In the past, some Web clients have used huristics that would end an
attribute value at a greater-than character regardless of quoting. But in
some cases this can introduce serious ambiguity in how to parse markup,
causing it to be misread. This is becoming a bigger issue as markup and
quoted attributes become more complex.

The feeling among a number of people is that we need tools that give the
user control over how markup errors are treated, so that one can use a
strict mode for authoring, and a mode that silently tries to recover from
errors for viewing.

Further reading, for those that want it:

HTML specifications page:

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

HAL Software Systems HTML Services and Products (includes an HTML syntax
checker):

http://www.halsoft.com/html/

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