Re: The META element

"Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@avron.ICS.UCI.EDU>

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Date: Mon, 12 Sep 94 17:12:29 EDT
Message-id: <9409121411.aa14083@paris.ics.uci.edu>
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From: "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@avron.ICS.UCI.EDU>
To: Multiple recipients of list <html-wg@oclc.org>
Subject: Re: The META element 
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Terry writes:

> Your argument that META is supported because it goes in the head,
> where nothing is rendered, is pretty neat.  In that case, why not
> insert it at Level 0?

Hmmmm... I guess I've just never thought of it as being in the
"minimum conformance level."  Currently, all of the elements and
attributes from the proposed section are listed as level 1.

** BUG in spec: pg. 2-15; Highlighting is incorrectly listed as Level 2 **

Perhaps we should clarify what each of the Levels actually mean.
>From the current spec, it looks like:

    Level 0 -- what a text-only browser can conveniently display + IMG ALT
    Level 1 -- + highlighting + in-line images + newish features
    Level 2 -- + forms

The problem here is what do you do about a browser like Lynx --
it handles (most) highlighting and (most) forms, but only uses the
alt attribute of inline images.  Also, what does it mean to be almost
conformant to any given level?  It may be better to go with

    Level 0 -- what all browsers can conveniently render
    Level 1 -- + images
    Level 2 -- + forms

with the idea being that browsers can signal their preference for
image-free content (i.e. a version of the document that does not depend
on the images for information) and for forms-free processing.
In this case, the proposed elements/attributes would all be under level 0.

At this point, I'm seriously tempted to just throw-away the idea of
levels and go with 2.0 = text/html, 3.0 = text/html3, etc.
But, I may have just forgotten why it is we needed the levels.

Comments?

...Roy Fielding   ICS Grad Student, University of California, Irvine  USA
                   (fielding@ics.uci.edu)
    <A HREF="http://www.ics.uci.edu/dir/grad/Software/fielding">About Roy</A>