Re: New Standards

In message <m0tDHyv-000A4WC@emptiness.samsara.com>, Joseph Arceneaux writes:
>Recently however, I noticed there was some confusion about which
>organization to address for standards, so pointers would be
>appreciated.

Hmmm... you're not the first person to ask this. The info must be
a little hard to find. I'll update the HTML page to answer it:

http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/MarkUp/#discussion

==================================
HTML Groups, Discussion Forums, and
Archives

comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html 
      A USENET newsgroup where HTML authoring issues are discussed.
      "How To ..." questions should be addressed here. Note that many
      issures related to forms and CGI, image maps, transparent gifs, etc.
      are covered in the WWW FAQ. 
www-html 
      A technical discussion list, with a hypertext archive (now searchable!
      Thanks EIT guys!). 

      If you have a proposal for a change to HTML, you might start a
      discussion here to see what other developers think of it. Always check
      the archive first! 
HTML Working Group 
      W3C staff members edit and review HTML standards in the HTML
      working group of the IETF. 
            WG mailing list archives 
            Internationalization of the Hypertext Markup Language, 15
            August 1995 
            forms-based file upload 
            client-side image maps 

      If you have researched a proposal thoroughly and at least started to
      get some implementation experience, you may submit your proposal to
      html-wg for standardization in the IETF. 

      If you are new to the IETF, you should probably do some background
      reading. I recommend: 
            IETF Working Group Process 
            Guidelines to Draft Authors 
            The TAO of the IETF 
========================================


>We have a new standard for extending HTML to include programming;  we
>are calling our language Meta-HTML.  Our documents get run through an
>interpreter where HTML comes out like it went in and Meta-HTML gets
>executed and the results substituted inline.

Standards are needed when large groups of folks need to agree on
things; e.g. the HTTP standard is necessary because every web browser
and server have to agree.

An agreement about a server-side processing technique is between the
implementor/vendor, and the user/customer. So I'd agree that you need
documentation/specification which might benefit from wide review, but
I don't think you need a standard -- unless you expect to have lots
of vendors producing products that need to agree on Meta-HTML (as is
the case with CGI). And even then, it's not clear that this is in
the scope of the charters of HTTP-WG nor HTML-WG.

Note the Reply-To: www-html@w3.org.

Dan

Received on Wednesday, 8 November 1995 18:56:23 UTC