Re: Toward Closure on HTML

"Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@hal.com>
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Date: Tue, 5 Apr 1994 17:04:01 --100
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From: "Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@hal.com>
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Subject: Re: Toward Closure on HTML 
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In message <9404050317.AA06756@mobius.geom.umn.edu>, burchard@geom.umn.edu writ
es:
>Daniel W. Connolly writes:
>>
>> FORMS, TABLES, AND MATH
>>
>> I think forms should be a separate document type.  I don't
>> see a requirement to be able to include forms inside
>> arbitrary documents. And I see more value in separating
>> them from the normal HTML document type.
>>
>> The same goes for tables, math, and small inline images.
>
>Doesn't that largely defeat the purpose of this intermediate  
>standardization effort, if you ignore key Mosaic features like inline  
>images and interactive forms?

I didn't mean to leave out the <IMG> tag -- I meant that we shouldn't
standardize on a way to stick GIFs in the _same_datastream_ as
HTML, somethin like:
	<inline-img>23l4i23o487234oiu23o4ijo23i4j</inline-img>

The <img> element will certainly stay in the std.

I'm not quite sure what to do with forms. But what I'm suggesting
is that normal text/html _not_ include forms -- we make a separate
type application/html-form or some such and another DTD that includes
the form elements (plus most of the normal HTML elements).

Forms don't fit several requrements that I had in mind:
	* One should be able to write an HTML->RTF converter. What
	happens to forms there?
	* What happens when forms get printed?

But I don't mean to be adamant about anything. If there's a clear
consensus on how forms work, I'm all for it, I guess.

I guess I just haven't worked with them enough to know _exactly_ how
expressive they are.

Dan