Re: color: NCSA Mosaic, Netscape, and HTML3

lilley (lilley@afs.mcc.ac.uk)
Fri, 21 Jul 1995 10:58:55 +0100 (BST)

Benjamin Franz said:

> On Wed, 19 Jul 1995, Michael Johnson wrote:
> > See http://mordor.relay.com/Traveler/ and then you can think about the
> > advisability of posting unproductive ranting to a working discussion group.

> You should also seriously think about adding PNG graphic support. The libs
> are public and free.
>
> <URL:http://quest.jpl.nasa.gov/Info-ZIP/people/greg/png.html>

And (noting your browser does multi-threaded image streaming) the
libraries are re-entrant specifically to make them easy to add to
browsers. Also note that you could beat Netscape and Mosaic to market
on this one.

> So turn off syntax checking except when you *need* it. You are going to
> ship it with syntax checking turned off by default, right? Learn from
> Netscape's error of "You are submitting a form insecurely...."
> defaulting on. Don't annoy people unnecessarily.

Not the same thing. Popping up a big dialog box is really annoying,
sure. Although Netscape could hardly do it any other way because the
whole reason for existence of Netscape 1.1N is to sell their secure
server to the commercial sector. But flagging bad HTML in an Arena-like
manner (except, getting it right ;-) is no more intrusive than a broken
key icon, and could be left on all the time.

Actually, if the browser incorporates a pukka SGML parser and checks
against the DTD - it's not an ad-hoc bunch of error reporting from a
custom parser, is it? - you could display the HTML 2.0 tick icon used
by the Hal HTML validation service.[1] Or a broken HTML icon, as
appropriate.

Does Traveller take any notice of the DOCTYPE declaration?


[1] <http://www.halsoft.com/html-val-svc/>

-- 
Chris Lilley, Technical Author
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