Re: Re WWW ideas

Tony Johnson (TONYJ@scs.slac.stanford.edu)
Mon, 5 Apr 1993 12:13 PDT


Dave Raggett writes....

>What mechanism do you want to see for adding some simple extensions to HTML
>e.g. to support forms and tables? As you know, I have thought quite a bit
>about both of these. Perhaps an experimental browser and sample docs are
>needed?

I would very much like to see both TABLES and FORMS implemented in HTML. I
have a number of applications which could benefit greatly from the addition of
these facilities.

I like your specific proposals for TABLE and FORMS and think they should form
the basis for discussion of extension of the HTML format in these areas.

>What happened to our ideas for having richer forms with support for
>multiple fields? I enclose for you my proposal for extending HTML to
>support such forms. An outstanding issue is how you can escape special
>characters in search string. I seem to remember that   style
>sgml character references are permitted, but this seems to be missing from
>the current addressing bnf doc:

I have previously suggested that we use the %nn (eg %32) syntax for special
characters in search strings. (See my message to www-talk, 25-Feb-1993, subj:
"Handling + in document searches") In reposonse to this note TimBL suggested
this would be implemented in the next version of the WWWLibrary. I would
certainly like to see this (or something giving equivalent functionality)
documented in the HTTP documentation.

Tony Johnson