Re: Toward Closure on HTML

Daniel W. Connolly (connolly@hal.com)
Tue, 05 Apr 1994 10:44:34 -0500


In message <199404050611.GAA03210@threejane>, Marc Andreessen writes:
>
>No no no a thousand times no absolutely not. This is completely out
>of the question and conflicts severely with current practice.

I don't think so. I've seen lots of pages that say "You'll need a WWW
client that understands forms to use this..." I think current practice
most certainly does include the notion of labelling forms-using pages
as such.

> Making
>forms a "separate document type" would grievously wound WWW as it now
>exists.

How so?

An HTTP client, for example, is requried to handle HTML. If we make
forms part of HTML, then all HTTP clients will have to grok forms. I
suggest that forms should be an optional feature. A client should
send:

Accept: application/html-form

to announce that it groks forms.

>If you don't see this, please look harder.

Ok. :-)

>Likewise for inlined images.

I misspoke on inlined images. There's nothing wrong with the IMG
element. But I think we need a way to combine image/gif data and
text/html data into one transaction. But that technique is not
ready for standardization yet. That's what I meant.

Dan