Re: HTML 4.0 gone - horrendous

Our apologies for this unfortunate screw up. We will try to have
it sorted out as soon as possible.


On Mon, 3 Jan 2000, Jukka Korpela wrote:

> I just noticed that links to items in the HTML 4.0 specification
> have stopped working. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has
> used links like
> <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/interact/forms.html"
> >section <cite>Forms</cite> in the HTML 4.0 specification</a>
> 
> Now they give "Sorry, Not found".
> 
> This isn't particularly delighting. It means updating lots of
> documents and bookmarks. It's frustrating because there was
> no need to break things that way. This is a particularly
> illustrative example of item 6 in
> http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990530.html
> 
> It seems that the HTML 4.01 specification items can be referred
> to by URLs like
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html
> That is, it would probably suffice to run a global replace over
> all of my files, replacing REC-html40 by html401 and hoping for
> the best. That would solve the problem for links on _my_ pages.
> For the time being. Assumably HTML 4.02 or something would break
> things again.
> 
> Please tell me this was not intentional.
> 
> HTML 4.01 was supposed to be a minor update to HTML 4.0,
> wasn't it? Surely it would make sense to let old links work
> and just point to corresponding location in the updated spec.
> 
> There's more confusion:
> 
> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/
> still exists and carries the heading
> "HTML 4.0 Specification 
> W3C Recommendation 25 December 1999" 
> and says it was superseded by
> http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/
> the previous day (!). And that document, in turn, says that the
> "Latest version of HTML" is
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html/
> which calls itself "Proposed Recommendation".
> 
> With this in mind, I won't even mention that the specification is
> self-contradictory in a detail: the marginwidth and marginheight
> attributes. (Now we know the smallest value isn't 2 as the original
> HTML 4.0 spec says, but we still don't know whether it is 0 or 1.
> IMHO there's little reason to require it to be positive.)
> 
> -- 
> Yucca, http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/ or http://yucca.hut.fi/yucca.html
> 

Regards,

-- Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett
tel/fax: +44 122 578 3011 (or 2521) +44 385 320 444 (mobile)
World Wide Web Consortium (on assignment from HP Labs)

Received on Monday, 3 January 2000 07:29:06 UTC