Re: Toward Closure on HTML

Daniel W. Connolly (connolly@hal.com)
Tue, 05 Apr 1994 09:52:36 -0500

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