Last week, we took a look at
the history of hypertext markup language, and how standards committees,
corporate development, and personal agendas have swayed its evolution. And, with
a bit of optimism, we saw how the most recent public version of HTML, dubbed 3.2,
managed to do an admirable job of digging through the mass of browser-compatibility issues to record "current practice."
But it wasn't always this rosy.
Still, as fast as technology develops in the digital world, any effort to
create standards is going to be obsolete almost by default. And such is the case
with HTML 3.2. The specification essentially captured the Web in the 2.0 browser
world, where frames and scripting and style were only beginning to emerge.
Thus, with a solid spec under its belt and a handful of new technologies
beginning to mature, the World Wide Web Consortium is beginning to show off the
next version of the language, which is destined for the 4.0 moniker, but currently under
the developmental codename "Cougar."
Not surprisingly, Cougar takes off where
HTML 3.2 left off. Cougar itself can't really be considered a spec -
it's more like a collection of specifications. This group of drafts is far-reaching, detailing everything from how frames work in current browser
implementations to internationalization issues in structured documents. By
bringing together the various drafts, the W3C can give Web authors and
designers something concrete to turn to when making technology decisions,
while leaving the various standards bodies with small, manageable chunks on
which to focus their energy.
Best of both worlds? Let's hope so. Without a solid spec to follow, browsers
spit your content out in random, uncontrolled ways. And that hurts not only
content providers and end users, but browser developers as well. If
something looks broken on a page, who gets blamed?
Regardless, there's a lot to learn from the new spec. Just keep in mind
that these are proposed drafts; they're merely up for discussion, and
not intended for you to start citing as "standard HTML." There's a lot of
work to be done on these documents to get them into a blessed
specification.
Included are new drafts on the following development areas: linking,
styles, scripting, forms, frames, objects, entities, file upload, tables, and
internationalization. We'll take a look at what's offered in the first few
this week, and will cover the remainder in future Tools columns.
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