HTML 4.0 Approved

[Peter C. Gorman]

Roy Tennant writes:

>One of my personality flaws is that I'm practical to a fault. So when I
>look at HTML 4.0 I see a specification doomed to failure. 4.0 is not an
>incremental enhancement from 3.2, as 3.2 was for 2.0, but rather a
>complete rewrite from the ground up. For the mass of Web authors out
>there, 4.0 represents a learning cliff. I strongly doubt that most will
>choose to scale that cliff, particularly when something much better lurks
>in the wings -- XML.

On the other hand, no one's being forced to swallow the whole thing. In my
case, I really need the class and id attributes for indexing applications,
and 3.2 just doesn't cut it. I just worked on a very large project (the
earlier-announced Jonas Hallgrimsson  site) which I validated against the
4.0 (transitional) DTD and encoded with the text editor BBEdit. It wasn't
any harder than working with HTML 3.0, but I didn't try to throw the
kitchen sink in it, either. You use the specific things you need, and wait
for the browsers to catch up before trying the fancier stuff. But then, I
*am* getting pretty tired of waiting for ids to be supported as link
targets...

PG
_______________________________
Peter C. Gorman
University of Wisconsin
General Library System
Automation Services
pcgorman at facstaff.wisc.edu
(608) 265-5291