- From: lilley <lilley@afs.mcc.ac.uk>
- Date: Tue, 2 Jan 1996 11:43:43 +0000 (GMT)
- To: esr@locke.ccil.org (Eric S. Raymond)
- Cc: www-html@w3.org
Eric S. Raymond says: > I've been watching the traffic on this list for about three weeks now, and I > fear I understand less than I did when I came in. > > What is the state of HTML standardization? Confusing, but getting there. > Is there, anywhere, a list of all the tags in the known universe with > provenances and compatibility information attached? I am unaware of a complete list; tracking all the wild and wacky vendor extensions, which tend to be porrly documented if at all, would be a considerable task. > Is there an RFC, > ISO or ANSI process converging on some description of an HTML standard, > or levels of standardization? Yes. The World Wide Web Consortium, W3C, is a vendor-neutral body which is swiftly working towards developing a well described HTML definition. See http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/MarkUp/ > It seems that HTML itself mirrors the web -- incredibly rich, but maddeningly > difficult to pin down when you're looking for specifics. If I were to build > a browser or authoring tool, how would I know what to implement and when to > stop? Well that would depend on your level of resources. But implement the HTML 2.0 specification in full and add powerful error recovery as a minimum requirement. After that, I would suggest implementing tables, file upload, and internationalisation, plus support for inline PNG and pJPEG. See: http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/WD-tables.html http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/html/rfc1867.txt ftp://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/html/draft-ietf-html-i18n-02.txt http://www.alis.com:8085/ietf/html/ http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/WD-png.html http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/jpeg-faq/faq.html Then if you really want to steal a march on the competition, implement the insert element (but be prepared to tweak, as that spec in in it's first draft): http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/WD-insert.html Support for style sheets would be a smart move; especially for a good authoring tool. http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/WD-css1.html http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/WD-style.html Hope that provides some useful pointers. -- Chris Lilley, Technical Author and JISC representative to W3C +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Manchester and North Training & Education Centre ( MAN T&EC ) | +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Computer Graphics Unit, Email: Chris.Lilley@mcc.ac.uk | | Manchester Computing Centre, Voice: +44 161 275 6045 | | Oxford Road, Manchester, UK. Fax: +44 161 275 6040 | | M13 9PL BioMOO: ChrisL | | Timezone: UTC URI: http://info.mcc.ac.uk/CGU/staff/lilley/ | +-------------------------------------------------------------------+
Received on Tuesday, 2 January 1996 06:44:13 UTC