Re: here comes the URI

On Thu, 29 Apr 1999, Ignacio Javier wrote:

> <!ELEMENT literal (#PCDATA) --an informatic literal term (the things one
> must do to be clear without sending a message in html to the list-->

Please don't confuse yourself (and others). Just send plain text.

> Is the sintax <literal>javascript:</literal> standard?

No. And the URI syntax is defined outside HTML specifications. The
HTML specs just make references to URI specs. See e.g.
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#h-6.4
Note that the references need to be taken generically enough,
basically to refer to newest URI specifications. (After HTML 4.0
was approved, the generic URI syntax has been modified, by RFC 2396, 
somewhat from the one defined in RFC 1738. See
http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/rfc/2396/full.html#G ) 

For your information, see http://www.w3.org/Addressing/schemes.html
for an attempt at an exhaustive list of URI schemes in use,
standard or not. And for some practical authoring notes against
using javascript: scheme, see
http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/forms/javascript.html#window

As regards to what HTML specifications _should_ say about URIs,
perhaps it would be a good idea to include a list of URI schemes
that browsers (or UAs in general) _must_ support, and a list of
URI schemes for which support is _recommended_. Although the
first list might contain just http: (and anonymous ftp: ?)
and the second one would probably be short too, this would
have some informative value to authors. It could give some
perspective and discourage from relying on schemes which don't
work universally.

-- 
Yucca, http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/ or http://yucca.hut.fi/yucca.html

Received on Thursday, 29 April 1999 08:19:18 UTC