Future plans for HTML

HTML directions

Bad HTML

A perl script was written by Dan Connolly to clean up bad HTML.

Also, see Dan's HTML spec (draft) which contains a sort of test suite.

New features

Header

Disadvantage: If mandatory, the size of the minimum document is increased.

A "Body" tag might be useful in the same light, for the rest.

Link

An empty element.

Atributes are as for the anchor element.

Dates

The expiry date-time will allow long cache times for documents such as RFCs, and short or zero caching times for varing data.

<DATE CREATED="920630123067" EXPIRES="920706000000">

(Is there an SGML standard for datetimes? Which standard to use standard? HyTime?)

Highlighting

Numbered HPn tags These are rather meaningless. In practice, everyone has to remember which is bold and which is italic. Logical tags. Dan: "I'd prefer <em>, <tt>, <cite>, ala TeX. Or we could go with the O'Reilly/Hal DocBook tags: <Emphasis>, <OopsChar>, <wordasword>,<CiteBook>,<Subscript>, <Superscript>". A problem is there are never enough of them, so people reuse them on the understanding that they will be bold, etc. Physical tags: <Bold>, <italic> etc as in MIME. There would have to be an understanding that equivalent representations could be substituted where bold and italic are not available.

Base address

savedas Could be a name for the tag to give the address with which the document was saved, so that relative links could be resolved even when a document is found out of context (like mailed).

Fixed width text with anchors etc

Note that an editor could always save in this element something which was originally loaded as a raw text section: indeed, the raw text is really only a (very useful!) way of importing text which could also go though a filter to make it valid marked up SGML.

Fixed width indented

Ordered list

Link types

Entities

Comments