Re: Looking toward the IETF meeting

lee@sq.com
Tue, 29 Nov 94 16:26:14 EST

Dan wailed lonesomely:
> The HTML 2.0 document has missed its marked window, in my
> opinion. When I started this effort, I had hoped that HTML 2.0 is what
> all the vendors would use in their marketing stuff and documentation.
> It would be the common feature set among the commercial
> implementations.
>
> But the first round of commercial browsers are already released.

That's true, but an authoratative document is still useful.

> We end up with a nice, neat specification of a language that some
> browsers sort of supported about six months ago.

And for another 6 months or so... it _has_ to be stable for at least
a little while, it's too expensive to release a new product every 6 weeks!

> But the critical thing about this document is endorsement of the major
> vendors. How do the folks from SoftQuad, NetScape, Spyglass, Spry,
> EIT, MCC (the consortium in Austin, not Mosaic Comm Corp) etc. feel
> about this? Which way should we go?

We need something that people agree on as having some kind of authority,
as soon as ever we can. It can be out of date, as long as it's a subset
of What's Current, not simply wrong...

This is so that we can work towards complete interoperability, and so
that people have really strong motivation to pay heed to the RFC.

Lee

-- 
Liam Quin, SoftQuad Inc +1 416 239 4801 lee@sq.com   <URL:http://www.sq.com/>
HexSweeper NeWS game;OPEN LOOK+XView+mf-fonts FAQs;lq-text unix text retrieval
SoftQuad HoTMetaL/HTML Editor; SoftQuad Panorama/WWW SGML Viewer (unreleased)
See our Web page for HoTMetaL ftp sites...  Take off those shoes and relax.