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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.

HTML 2.0: In Final Review

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Out of date, but we're reviving it.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

HTML 3 and up: In Development

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

HTML 1.0: Historical

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

W3C Connolly
$Id: MarkUp.html,v 1.9 1995/06/20 15:50:15 connolly Exp $