Re: Netscape v NCSA, Progress?

Gavin Nicol (gtn@ebt.com)
Tue, 18 Oct 1994 03:57:05 +0500

>> The test is whether they THEN are willing to submit to community review AND
>> MODIFICATION. And this must be done in an open forum, such as an open
>> standards group. (I'm biased towards the IETF, but choose any one that is
>> open and effective.)
>>
>
>Well, I know I am probably going to stir up trouble with this e-mail,
>but in my past experience the HTML group has not been terribly "open".
>
>They just repeat over and over, "Yes, we admit that hundreds (thousands?)
>of people want formatting control, but they are all wrong, and SGML/HTML
>is content not format so tough." So what should I do when the open
>standards group insists on a standard that is not what our customers
>(the ones who will indirectly be paying my salary) want?
>
>You want me to say, "sorry, I know this isn't what you want, but an open
>standards group of which you weren't a part has decided that this is
>really for your own good, so please give us money anyway."

I would be somewhat more convinced by this argument if mcom had made
extension that showed an understanding of the *deep* problems rather
than the superficial ones. The extra tags added could very well come
back and bite everyone in precisely the way that the original HTML
did: by putting style information directly into the structure of a
document (remember, why is <P> as a container for text better than <P>
as a paragraph seperator?). As someone else has already pointed out,
HML 3.0 and stylesheets are going to solve most of these problems.

While I am loath to point to it, you should look at DynaText(tm) to
see what SGML and stylesheets can accomplish before inventing another
LaTeX. It shows both the benefits of stylesheet based viewing, and of
structured searches based on SGML tags.

Another vote for text/x-mozilla-html.

BTW. I'm still not sure why everyone is raving over Mozilla....

PS. Is anyone other than me interested in using TEI path names as a
subdocument addressing scheme for URL's pointing to SGML documents?