Re: <math>, <fig>, ... (fwd)

Megazone wrote:

> >BTW, I am the author of a german book about HTML, that also has been
> >published in frensh and dutch, and this books describes <math> and <fig>
> >and all the related elements and so do most of the books I know. My
> 
> And that is bad practice on the part of the authors *unless* they make
> is VERY VERY clear that the tags are *not* ratified, *unofficial*, and
> *likely* to change or die.  Then an person doing pages can choose to use
> them knowing they risk having to redo them later.
> 
> If an author misleads her readers into believing these phantom tags are
> concrete - then I think we should flay the author alive with live multicast
> on MBONE to serve as an example to others.

Thats true! But it is also true that there has been a  need to publish
books about HTML. Most of the books about this topic are selling
quite good - guess why!
So - what shall the authors write about? About the Netscape-Reality 
or about the W3C-dreams. I decided to do both. And I made 
clear, that HTML 3.0 is expired and thus unofficial. This was the
only possible way to do a good HTML-book and far away from beeing
"bad practice", as you call it. The HTML3.0 documentation was the 
only available document for months. There has been no alternative to using it 
when writing books about the Internet! 
It is bad practice to eliminate HTML-elements, no matter if they are
official or not! It may happen that the  book authors will stop reading the
DTDs and focus on the commercial reality and suddenly the war is lost!
Nobody will be interested in the W3C-HTML-activities any more, when 
nothing will be written about this any more!
Rather put the old tags into the deprecated section of the DTD as soon as 
possible! Further developments of HTML will not be influenced by this
in any negative way. 
I still dont see why the tags were eliminated. The W3C should not 
be the one to decide which tags are alive and which are dead. This is 
done by Netscape, Microsoft and the Internet-user-community.
W3C shouls decide, which tags are syntactically OK and usefull
and which are not. But what was wrong with <math> and <fig>?

Joachim Schwarte

Received on Friday, 10 May 1996 08:48:46 UTC