Re: HTML4.0 draft: comments re: inclusion of frames (fwd)

In article <l03110707b03b6b8842fa@[192.168.1.117]>,
Jordan Reiter <jreiter@mail.slc.edu> wrote:
> At 12:37 PM -0500 1997-09-09, Arnoud "Galactus" Engelfriet wrote:
> >The problem here is that "reality" mostly means "Whatever Netscape
> >comes up with", as far as new HTML extensions are concerned. Given
> >their history of strange extensions, that's not really a good way
> >to work on a new standard.
> 
> Oh, I don't know--I think Marc Andreessen and/or Netscape Inc. came up with
> some pretty clever HTML ideas.  You know, some obscure elements like:
> 
> <IMG> [1]

You mean the <IMG SRC something.xbm> element? True, that was proposed
by Marc Andreessen[0], but I wouldn't want to call it a _good_ proposal
even if he had included the "=" character between SRC and the name
of the image.

Now, if he had invented FIG, or something that would *work* on clients
when image loading is disabled, then I would agree with you.

[0] I always forget how many E's and S's there are in his name..

> <FONT> (I know it's deprecated, but it was good while it lasted)

Warren Steel has a very good essay on the evils of FONT:
http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~mudws/font.html

> The BGCOLOR, TEXT, LINK, VLINK, ALINK, and BACKGROUND attributes

This, as well as the FONT element, could and most definitely SHOULD
never have been introduced in the first place. I mean, it's not like
stylesheets are a *new* idea; the first draft came out *before*
Netscape 0.96!

By introducing these elements and attributes, the apparent problem of
"We can't get a nice presentation of our documents in Netscape" was
solved, but at the cost of turning HTML in a half-baked presentational
language. 

> All browser makers are guilty of creating elements in order to further the
> functionality or visuality of HTML.  

This is true, but until recently, Netscape was *the* browser for a large 
number of authors. I'm not aware of any other browser makers that
introduced any such extensions, especially not any extensions that
didn't work at all on other clients.

-- 
E-mail: galactus@htmlhelp.com .................... PGP Key: 512/63B0E665
Maintainer of WDG's HTML reference: <http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/>

Received on Wednesday, 10 September 1997 14:09:51 UTC