Re: HTML 4.0 draft available

At 2:21 PM -0000 7/8/97, Dave Raggett wrote:
>The first public draft of the HTML 4.0 specification is now
>available. This has been rewritten from the Cougar drafts.
>The goal is to work towards a proposed recommendation. The spec
>is the result of 3 years work in the W3C HTML working group and
>discussions on www-html. I would very much like to see discussion
>on this list and will do my best to respond quickly, although
>this may not always be that easy when traveling.
[snip]
>Feedback is welcome on the structure of the draft as well as
>the technical content. I would like to make the specification
>as easy to understand as possible for a wide range of people.

I am somwhat bewildered by the sudden surge of "deprecated" attributes and
tags.  I recognize that the existence of style sheets does make it possible
to indicate the appearance of the web page, but I question the assumption
that everyone has access to a browser that supports them; especially a
browser that supports them correctly.  Assuming that most users will not be
using the latest versions of software (heck, I still use Netscape 3.0),
then it is foolish to assume that style sheets can cover your problems.
Only the newer browsers from Netscape and Explorer support style sheets,
and they do so in an unconsistent and incomplete form.

I have attempted using the BIG and SMALL tags in my documents to avoid the
use of FONT SIZE= and have found it to be limiting and unpredictable.  For
pages where informational content is key, I could certainly use simple HTML
formatting in conjunction with style sheets, but for pages that depend on
visual appearance, especially for businesses, I will probably continue
using these tags.

--------------------------------------------------------
[                    Jordan Reiter                     ]
[            mailto:jreiter@mail.slc.edu               ]
[ "You can't just say, 'I don't want to get involved.' ]
[  The universe got you involved."  --Hal Lipset, P.I. ]
--------------------------------------------------------

Received on Tuesday, 8 July 1997 11:23:11 UTC