Interest in HTML Conformance?
"Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@hal.com>
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Date: Mon, 11 Apr 1994 21:31:17 --100
Message-id: <9404111922.AA27369@ulua.hal.com>
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: connolly@hal.com
Originator: www-talk@info.cern.ch
Sender: www-talk@www0.cern.ch
Precedence: bulk
From: "Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@hal.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
Subject: Interest in HTML Conformance?
X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas
Content-Length: 1366
I'm curious about the level of interest in publishing HTML standards
and promoting widespread agreement about the meaning of "HTML support"
in, for example, product literature.
Marc suggested we issue an informational RFC to document basically
what Mosaic and lynx do.
Somebody even piped up about doing something through an ISO WG or some
such.
I'm interested in establishing a formal definition of HTML -- perhaps
a few variants including "Minimal HTML Support" (no forms, no nested
lists, conforming SGML), "Mosaic-2.x Support" (where 2.x is some
future release of Mosaic which coincides with publication of a DTD
that it supports).
Perhaps HTML+ could be incorporated as a level of support.
I'm willing to maintain a test suite that defines the variants
of conformance.
But I discovered some time ago that writing user documentation is
beyond my scope of expertise. And we certainly need human-readable
descriptions of HTML to go along with the machine readable DTD and
test suite.
I have talked some with a writer from NCSA who might be able to help,
but it didn't sound like he had a lot of time to contribute.
Are most folks (including the NCSA Mosaic licensees) content to define
HTML as "whatever the latest release of Mosaic supports", or are we
interested in published specifications? And do we have resources to
contribute toward that end?
Dan