Re: Conformance ratings (was: Extra! Microsoft beats Netscape in the race for non-conformance!) (fwd)

> Once upon a time Daniel W. Connolly shaped the electrons to say...
> >If the extension documentation was accompanied by a DTD, the validation
> >systems could stay up-to-date trivially.
> 
> This is something I do feel needs to be addressed.  I don't think there is
> any problem with vendor extensions, but I do believe the vendor is then
> responsible to generate a DTD to cover them.
Each each vendor has a DTD and a corresponding doctype, the multivendor
problem has a relatively easy solution. The content negotiation.
The browser says (I accept pages that are in HTML 2, HTML 3, NS-HTML 2.0,
or MSIE-HTML 3.17.2B-1996.

The server can then supply a page in the proper form of HTML. Server side
includes and ifdefs can be used to keep from having N copies of each document.

Also if every vendor provides DTDs, the jobs of standards groups becomes
easier. At least in some cases it can be just a matter of reconciling
the different DTDs (who cares what the page actually looks like :-).

Received on Tuesday, 20 February 1996 02:40:37 UTC