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Umm... er... blech.
I don't consider format negociation a hack. I consider it an
important, though underutilized part of the web functionality.
Your suggestion on the the other hand... well... could you give
a formal description of the language you're suggesting we adopt?
I don't consider "try it on a couple browsers and see it it works" a
viable specification for HTML.
I expect that HTML will be more and more subject to machine
interpretation -- automatic indexing etc. I'd like to facilitate
those sorts of tools, not make them hopelessly complex and fragile.
Right now, we've got a bunch of tools that down-convert to HTML, and
very few tools besides browsers that read HTML. Contrast tools like
RTF2HTML and LaTeX2HTML with the www_and_frame tool that I wrote so
long ago: www_and_frame would not just write HTML, but it would
read it back in again as well.
For larger, "enterprise" applications, managing documents as HTML is
a bad idea. But for lots of stuff, it would be nice to be able to edit
in MS word, convert to HTML (without loss of information!), send
it to a friend, who edits it using FrameMaker or Word Perfect, and
sends the edited version back. (The wwwlib maintainers are hot on
adding support for PUT and POST in the library, with the hopes that
lots of collaborative applications will be enabled.)
The 2.0 HTML DTD doesn't facilitate this very much. I think we need
to take the "strict" mode even further -- introduce hierarchy and such,
while making the "loose" version even looser -- more in line with
what browsers really implement.
Dan