Re: Agenda

Peter K. Sheerin (psheerin@best.com)
Wed, 12 Jul 95 01:14:24 EDT

On 11 Jul 95 at 17:43, Eric W. Sink wrote:

> Here are some proposed items for the HTML WG meeting agenda. I'll firm
> this up a bit tomorrow, with time allocations for each item:
>
> Review of Charter
> It's out of date -- time to revise it.

Well, I'm new to this list, I'm not a member of the official WG, but if
you're going to be revising the charter, even slightly, let me make one
request. That you at least discuss changing the language to support some
minimalist way of defining what browsers do with the standards the group
designs.

I suspect there have been great flaming debates on this point, but I truly
think there needs to be a consistent implementation of some aspects of the
standard. Not much, but small things, like what to do with character set
mappings where gaps are left in the defining specs, and other things where
differences in interpretations or using loopholes in different ways leads
to browsers that don't work alike. Things like whether to display an
<isindex> tag inline or at the base of the document.

As a web user, I want things to work about the same no matter which
browser I happen to use, or which browser was a particular webmaster's
favourite.

As a page developer, I want things to be reasonably consistent, so I don't
have to test several different browsers, under several different
configurations, to see what else I need to tweak. There are too many
browsers out there for these standards *not* to have some voice over the
ultimate presentation of the documents.
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