HTML -> >- Printed Copy

[Albert Lunde]

>BUT the numbers of display technologies seems to be growing:
>HTML 2, HTML 3 (proposed), Netscape HTMLisms, Microsoft HTMLisms,
>Acrobat, richer SGML DTDs, Postscript, Envoy, ... and now Microsoft
>new technology.
[...]
>The answer should be by the use of content negotiation (see
>Brian Behlendorf's excellent introduction at the URL
>http://www.organic.org/Staff/brian/cn/)
>However I understand that this is only implemented in the
>Apache and W3O (formerly CERN) server.  Is this true?
>Should we be lobbying the server and client developers
>to support content negotiation?

Yes, but... the HTTP working group is currently re-thinking
content-negotitation protcols (and some other stuff that has been featured
in prior versions of HTTP specs).

I'm on the http-wg list but haven't had time to read the latest proposal in
detail. I think the revisions are aimed at teducing the bandwidth or extra
round-trips in simple cases, and making the choices more flexiblem in
complex cases. So at this point, the vendors would be best advised not to
start shipping a product but to participate in the process of refining the
spec (and perhaps thereby removing reasons it _hasn't_ been more widely
implemented.)

Some other related ideas suggested on various IETF working groups include
modular DTDs for different varients of HTML and some sort of indications of
various browser and HTML feature sets.

The standardization process is _trying_ to deal with this WWW Tower of
Babel in various ways. So far the market seems to more inclined towards
"hot new features" over "interoperability".

Wider availablity/downloadability of TrueType fonts _might_ make it
feasible to use the same fonts on more platforms (thus short-cutting a
sticky problem for those trying to do fancy HTML markup) but a lot depends
on the details. As with a lot of other announcements, it's an attempt to
make a defacto standard of something, ... , in this case, it looks like
another move vis-a-vis Adobe...




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    Albert Lunde                      Albert-Lunde at nwu.edu