> I'd appreciate it if you could go into more detail on how HTML 3's
> backwards-compatibility is better. [...]
HTML 3 uses <A> to define areas, so by default older
browsers would render the alternate text as a link.
It would be badly formatted, but the links would all
be accessible.
> [...] One note on the AREA element and the ALT tag
> - the reason to do this rather than have AREA be a container is to improve
> the quality of backwards compatibility. If AREA were a container, there
> would be no way for an older browser to know not to render that markup.
But if the <MAP> were in an external document,
older browsers would never even see the markup,
since they don't understand USEMAP. If you
allowed <MAP>s to appear in the <HEAD>, (working)
2.0-compliant browsers should also ignore it.
Re-reading 2.3, it looks like this proposal does offer
more flexibility wrt. backwards compatibility than HTML 3.
It just wouldn't automatically let users see all the
links like <A>s in <FIG>s would, but that's probably
of dubious utility anyway; a backup ISMAP server
(which I don't *think* HTML 3 would allow, not sure)
is a better approach.
--Joe English
joe@trystero.art.com