Re: A BACKUP HTML tag

Christian Mogensen (mogens@CS.Stanford.EDU)
Mon, 24 Apr 95 14:52:58 EDT

Christian Mogensen wrote:
>>A better approach would be to allow this as a special type of URL, so
>>that normal HREFs could be used. This does not require any changes to
>>the spec's, and will parse without problem in current browsers. Note
>>that it will not perform as expected in current browsers, beyond
>>telling them that they don't understand the "browser:///back"
>>protocol.

Dirk Herr-Hoyman wrote:
>Why is this a better solution? This would require registering a URL,
>which requires changes to that spec. This would not be any easier to
>implement in the browser. Indeed, it implies a change to the wwwlib
>stuff, which I would not like to see.

Well, a <BACKUP> tag would introduce another form of link markup, which
I consider a Bad Idea. Far better (IMHO) to introduced an additional
form of the opaque string in HREF="url", which does not impact the HTML
spec. To define a new method is no big thing: write an RFC and hack a
browser to support it.

Look at Netscape! They are defining new methods willy-nilly.
about: and newsrc: methods are (so far) only seen in Netscape.
Adding a new URL protocol is much less hassle than adding a new tag.

I don't think libwww needs changing either, since any new stuff can be
handled before handing URLs off to the library. The libwww is pretty
flexible in this area.

Christian "webhead" <*>