Re: Really Quick Guide to Good HTML

Paul Prescod <papresco@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
>At 03:42 PM 2/20/96 -0800, Charles Peyton Taylor wrote:
>>A question, though:  I used to think that the <html></html>
>>tags were there to let the browser software know that 
>>the document was in HTML format.  But if that's so, then 
>>why is it defined as a MIME type on the server?
>
>HTML documents can be processed in situations that are unrelated to server
>MIME types.  For instance, some operating systems use HTML as the standard
>online help format.  Some people use HTML files on CD-ROMs.  The issue of
>figuring out the data type of an HTML file is a little more involved than
>I've made it sound, because there is another, more explicit ways of
>indicating the HTML format (called a doctype) and other, implicit mechanisms
>like file attributes and extensions.  It is important to realize that HTML
>can be used outside of an HTTP transaction and must be designed as a
>standalone language.

	Back in the good ole days, when what it now referred to as
HTTP/0.9 was just HTTP, clients were shareware or freeware, not 
market forces, and the object was content-rich, platform-independent
*information* sharing, the protocol did not use MIME headers, and the
<HTML> tag at the top indicated that the document was html, not plain
text.
				Fote

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Received on Tuesday, 20 February 1996 20:02:26 UTC