April 1996
Mark Buckley
Microsoft Corporation
Download DTD sample files (zipped, 8.31K).
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Microsoft Internet Explorer supports table markup and other extensions to the basic markup found in HTML 2.0. The attached files comprise an SGML DTD that describes valid HTML markup for Microsoft Internet Explorer 2.0, including these extensions.
The DTD defines, first of all, HTML that works with Internet Explorer. That is, if your HTML document parses according to this DTD, it should be handled correctly by Internet Explorer 2.0.
Moreover, the DTD describes the "intentions" of Internet Explorer. Because Internet Explorer is designed to be very accepting, it's quite possible to write HTML that does not conform to this DTD but that will display acceptably in Internet Explorer anyway. We recommend, however, that HTML documents created for use with Internet Explorer do follow the grammar defined in the DTD to allow for more predictable results as both HTML and Internet Explorer continue to evolve.
The DTD contains some Netscape extensions (for example, the NOSHADE attribute for <HR> that Internet Explorer does not support), as well as some table markup attributes (e.g., COLSPEC) that appear in the IETF HTML 3.0 Tables DTD, but that Internet Explorer does not support. Because we do not want HTML containing such markup to be rejected by a validating parser, we have included them in the DTD with comments.
This is a beta DTD. We expect some bugs. We also expect some disagreements about coding strategies for some of the more problematic aspects of the markup, for example, how to code the <CENTER> element. We encourage comments; please e-mail www-html@w3.org, Chris Wilson (cwilso@microsoft.com), or Mark Buckley (mbuckley@microsoft.com).
© 1996 Microsoft Corporation