Re: Attempt at HTML 2.1 (tables)

Brian Behlendorf (brian@organic.com)
Thu, 22 Jun 95 23:53:00 EDT

On Thu, 22 Jun 1995, Maurizio Codogno wrote:
> While I agree that it is important to have small incremental steps toward
> HTML3, i was thinking about if it would be better to leave them as
> independent extensions: that is, instead that having
>
> Tabular material in HTML
> (HyperText Markup Language 2.1)
> we should have
> An Extension to HTML2:
> Tabular material

That'll hurt efforts to make content transitions seamless using content
negotiation, though. Not that having ten steps between 2.0 and 3.0
isn't, I suppose. Although, I agree that forcing serialization could be
asking for trouble - if say a browser implemented maths and not tables,
and maths were HTML 2.2 and tables 2.1, then the browser couldn't claim
to accept "HTML 2.2", etc.

What we *could* do is give each incremental advance its own temporary
mime type, like text/x-html-tables, text/x-html-maths, etc. For
documents in which we want to use both tables and maths, we use <A
REL="include"> or some such to include the text/x-html-maths in a
text/html document, at least until we have something we can call
text/html; level=3.

Brian

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