Re: HTML 3.0

Brian Behlendorf (brian@organic.com)
Tue, 16 May 95 05:17:58 EDT

On Tue, 16 May 1995, Brian Exelbierd wrote:
> On May 5, 1995, eric@spyglass.com (Eric W. Sink) wrote:
> > Actually, the WG's attention toward this mammoth document will likely
> > decrease as we focus on several smaller documents which are much more
> > manageable. It seems likely that the I-D for HTML 3.0 will likely not be
> > updated in its current "One Big Document" format before its expiration.
> >
> > Remember Internet-Drafts flutter away after six months of life.
>
> Here is where I get to be the rude bastard who does none of the work, but
> complains, and can't even read the list :)

Welcome to the club. It's a role I've grown to cherish :) I think I've
done work from the provider side of things tho...

> Perhaps the working group should start publishing these "mini-standards" real
> fast before this I-D takes a life of its own. I don't want to see HTML turn
> into something with a useless standard, and a set of "optional" extensions.
> I'd like to see this get well documented.

I'm concerned with how content negotiation is going to work. Don't tell
me we'll see

Accept: text/html, text/html-with-tables(RFC ****),
text/html-with-figs(RFC ****), text/html-with-maths(RFC ****)

etc... if the idea is to make incremental version number increases, i.e.
"2.1 is 2.0 plus tables", "2.2 is 2.1 plus figs", that's only slightly
better. I can just see some documents on our server though: index.html,
index.html2.1, index.html2.2, etc. As a content provider I'll also want
to determine the lowest rev my page conforms to, and I think a lot of
content providers will get that number wrong. Ugh.

I guess my main frustration was that aside from a few issues HTML 3.0
didn't look all that far off - the REL/REV discussions are rather
orthogonal (I think we all now agree on the need for REV?), there was
some table stuff left (resolving differences with the CALS model, etc?)
We already have a 75%-of-the-way-there HTML 3 browser (Arena) as well as
an HTML 3 editor (asWedit, and no, I lost my references, but it's all
over Usenet). Are we really that much farther away? HTML 3.0 has been held
out as a holy grail for 2 years now, and people are starting to look
elsewhere.

I have a feeling that when Dave Raggett gets caught up with his mail
spool in Massachusetts we'll all have an answer :)

Brian-bot

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