Re: A Truly Heretical Suggestion

Marc Andreessen (marca@eit.COM)
Tue, 29 Mar 1994 11:32:07 --100


Dave Raggett writes:
> > How about we take the state of the art of HTML plus forms as currently
> > supported in Mosaic for X 2.2 -- and either fully supported or getting
> > pretty damn close to being fully supported in a number of other
> > browsers -- and issue an informational RFC within the next month or
> > two, including a working & complete DTD.
>
> I have a stripped down DTD which may be suitable for this, and am
> discussing this with CERN. Our goal is to smooth the path to the
> richer features in HTML+. Incidentally, my HTML+ browser will be
> on show at WWW'94 and will be publically released soon after. You
> can get an early glimpse of how it looks at:
>
> ftp://15.256.100.100/pub/htmplus.gif
>
> John C. Mallery writes:
> > Any chance of cleaning up the way form processing works before
> > casting it in stone?
>
> There are several new field types in the works: scribble on image,
> file transfer (Lou Montulli's suggestion) and a record-oriented database
> entry widget.

I strongly urge that those features be deferred for the purposes of
the first RFC.

> The submit button has been cleaned up and should be in the next
> release of Mosaic.

That may be minor enough that it'd squeeze in.

> I am also working on a clean script API for client-side handling of
> dynamic dependencies which a lot of people have been asking for.

That's definitely post-first-RFC :-).

> The aim here is to avoid tying WWW into a particular scripting
> language forever more by taking advantage of URLs and HTTP format
> negotiation to give us this independence.

Sounds fascinating...

Marc