Improvements on HTML.

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Date: Tue, 6 Apr 93 17:48:56 +0100
From: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@www3.cern.ch>
Message-id: <9304061648.AA02068@www3.cern.ch>
To: "Tony Johnson (415) 926 2278" <TONYJ@scs.slac.stanford.edu>
Subject: Improvements on HTML. 
Cc: dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com, www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Reply-To: timbl@nxoc01.cern.ch

There have been a lot of improvements proposed for HTML.

	- Various forms of includion of graphics
	- Tables
	- Forms

I think we should get some concrete proposals for an HTML2 out
onto this list.  This would bring us closer to a DTD for the
new thing, which would allow everyone to go out and
implement it.

It is important that noon gets the feeling that the basic
HTML spec is shifting under their feet, so a new name for the
enhanced format might be useful. But not endless discussion of it.

The new format should of course be a superset of HTML.  The first
thing it should incldue is indefinite nesting of constructs
which is not allowed in HTML.

To kick off the discussion, I propose for the forms part the
following

FIELDS
======
<FIELD NAME="f1" FIELDTYPE=TEXT MAXLEN=40>     </FIELD>

This field could be inserted anywhere, including
inside lists and character emphasis, and so would pick up
the formatting from that.  Any contents of the field
would, in a basic form, represent a default value.

The fieldtype could default to text, but other values
could be for example INT, FLOAT, URI. The latter would
allow icons to be dropped in, or bookmarks pasted in,
for giving references to other documents.
Example:

<h2>Personal Details</h2>
<DL>
<DT>Name<DD><EM><FIELD NAME="nam" FIELDTYPE=TEXT  
MAXLEN=40></FIELD></EM>
<DT>Address<DD><FIELD NAME="adr" FIELDTYPE=TEXT MAX=200></FIELD>
<DT>Children<DD><FIELD NAME="kids" FIELDTYPE=INT> 0 </FIELD>
<DT>Publications<DD><FIELD NAME="pubs" FIELDTYPE=URI MAX=100></FIELD>
</DL>
Any other comments?
<PRE>
<FIELD NAME="cmt"></FIELD>
</PRE>

RADIO BUTTONS
=============

The radio button element could have exactly the same syntax as the
MENU list or for that matter LI or DIR.  Or even an attribute
RADIO on any of these existing ones?  Need a way of setting the  
default.

<RADIO>
<LI>Male
<LI DEFAULT>Female
</RADIO>

Tim BL
_________________________________________________________


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