HyperText Markup Language (HTML)
HTML is a markup language for hypertext which is understood by all
WWW clients. Here we discuss the HTML language, i.e. its syntax
and semantics, including information on the
history of the language, status of the standard, and development issues.
If what you are looking for is not here, it may be in
- Information Provider Materials
- including
A style guide for online hypertext,
The HTTP protocol,
The server guide clickable images, etc.
- Web Tools
- Including HTML editors, filters, and converters
- www-html
- A discussion list, with a
hypertext archive (now searchable! Thanks EIT guys!)
- Style sheets
- In development.
- VRML
- Virtual Reality Markup Language
- SGML
- The architecture behind HTML.
- Edited Collections
-
- Automated Search Services
- Indexes such as lycos might help you discover
a number of resources related to HTML.
The HTML standardization effort is an IETF
working group. See: The
HTML Working Group Charter including milestones and current
internet drafts.
The html-wg
mailing list hypertext archive is an up-to-date and nearly
complete record of the activity of the group. (Minutes of IETF
meetings are available elsewhere.) See also, the
html-ig archives
The specification is still being refined, mainly a question of
defining its expression in terms of SGML, and accurately describing
current accepted practice.
- HTML 2.0 spec
- Aug 8 draft
For folks that want to play around with the SGML source: It uses a
document type by Gary Houston called Snafu. His GF: General
SGML Formatter package includes this DTD and a few others, and
some nifty tools to build TeXinfo, RTF, etc. from SGML documents.
- HTML 2.0 Public Text
- Current DTD, SGML Declaration, and other "SGML code"
- Aug 4 draft
- June 15 draft
-
- HTML Validation Service
- You can use this to check HTML documents, or to investigate the DTD.
(it's copy of the DTD may lag by a few days).
- May 31 internet draft: Hypertext Markup Language - 2.0
- May 6 internet draft: Hypertext Markup Language - 2.0 (130423 bytes)
- Publication History
- A brief history of HTML (and HTML+, html 1.0, 2.0, ...)
- Hierarchy of Content Models in the HTML 2.0 DTD
- An annotated walk-through of the HTML 2.0 DTD.
- An Essay on HTML
- Toward Closure on
HTML
- (see also
the www-talk mailing list archive for responses)
- HTML Test Suite
- Out of date, but we're reviving it. Stay tuned...
- HTML WG
Materials
- Roy Fielding maintains this excellent collection.
-
25 July 94 HTML-IG Toronto
- 26 July 94 WWW IETF BOF Toronto
Features such as tables, figures, mathematical equations, and
stylesheets are in development. The HTML 3.0 specification is
available as an Internet Draft, and smaller documents
are being prepared for discussion purposes on a number of
areas:
Discussion of these working documents will lead to revisions to
the HTML 3.0 specification, and new versions of the associated Internet
Draft. This page will be updated to point to the latest version as work
proceeds.
The Arena browser is being rewritten to fully implement the HTML3
specification together with support for style sheets, with the intention
of making it available as reference software at the end of this year for
most common platforms.
Pointers to further materials
- HTML 3 Specification
- March 28 draft. See also:
- Internationalization
- Support for western european writing systems is
widespread. Support for eastern european, CJK, and other writing
systems, as well as mixed-languge documents, is in the
works. Issues include character sets, encodings, bi-directional
rendering, fonts, currency and date formats, ...
See also:
- File Upload
- A forms-based file upload proposal is available at Roy Fielding's
archive
- Tables
- Tables were first proposed in Dave Raggett's HTML+ document. The
HTML 3.0 Draft refines the table proposal.
At a recent IETF meeting, a group of tables experts met after the
general HTML session, and they have signed up to write a concise
document explaining a refinement of the HTML 3 table model to
incorporate experience from working with CALS and other SGML table
models.
Subsequent discussions have now led to a revised proposal
for html tables, which has been submitted as an Internet Draft
Toward Graceful Deployment of Tables
in HTML
- Navigational Idioms
- Link relationships, Banner, Table of Contents, Agregate Documents, ...
- Structural Idioms
- ID, Class, Sections/Divisions, ranges/spans/spots,
annotation/sytlesheet hooks
- Forms, Image Maps, and Interactive Applications
- Client-side image maps, hooks into HotJava and other scripting
systems.
- Arena
- a testbed browser implementation available in
prerelease. Implements much of the HTML
3.0 Draft.
- Dave Raggett's presentation on HTML+ from WWW'94 in the spring
-
A HTML+ specification in hypertext,
- slightly out of date but giving a good idea of the features.
Ed: Dave Raggett;
- Style sheets
This is the level mandatory for all WWW clients.
Level-1 is basically the HTML of the initial WWW clients, plus images.
The level 1 spec is relatively old, so a better specification is to take
the level 1 features from level 2, above.
About level-1 there is:
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) Tim Berners-Lee, CERN
Internet Draft Daniel Connolly, Atrium
IIIR Working Group June 1993
Connolly
$Id: MarkUp.html,v 1.9 1995/06/20 15:50:15 connolly Exp $