Re: Looking toward the IETF meeting

Roy T. Fielding (fielding@avron.ICS.UCI.EDU)
Wed, 30 Nov 94 01:01:35 EST

Eric Sink wrote:

> Forgive the lack of IETF experience in this WG chair. What is "HTML 2.0" ?
> Did we just finish it, or did we just start it? I was under the impression
> that what we sent as an Internet Draft was a "draft", and changes will be
> made before we actually call it HTML 2.0. It is still not clear to me when
> that time arrives, but I assumed it was tied to the time when this document
> reaches RFC status.
>
> To put it another way: We want HTML 2.0 to be an RFC, whichever track it
> ends up in. Surely there will be opportunity for a few more changes
> between the Internet Draft and the RFC, right?

Yes, and your impression is correct as well. It will probably need about
5-6 drafts before it makes it through to RFC status. Even if all of us
have agreed on the HTML 2.0 content, the details of grammar, word-smithing,
and specificational correctness will result in many drafts.

For instance, the corrections I submitted for the META description have
still not made it into the draft. Worse, the text version has line-wrapped
the text in a way that generated invalid SGML attributes. This is not
surprising -- just a couple of the bumps in the specification process.

.....Roy Fielding ICS Grad Student, University of California, Irvine USA
<fielding@ics.uci.edu>
<URL:http://www.ics.uci.edu/dir/grad/Software/fielding>