HTML modes

About HTML

Most of the documents ("pages") found on the World Wide Web are written in HTML (HyperText Markup Language). HTML was originally designed as a standard hard- and software independent way of formatting documents. It is an application of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language).

The only official standard is HTML 2.0, which contains very limited possibilities. The W3 consortium was developing a new, extended standard, HTML 3.0.

Meanwhile, in the recent boom of Internet and the World Wide Web, some browser manufacturers have introduced several ad-hoc extensions to HTML, of which many didn't fit in the new HTML 3.0 standard. Probably because this would make HTML 3.0 an academic standard without any practical use, the development of HTML 3.0 was abandoned. AWeb supports some of the extensions found in HTML 3.0.

In the first half of 1996 the W3 group proposed a new HTML 3.2 standard, which contains many of the widely used NetScape ® and Microsoft ® Internet Explorer specific extensions. AWeb fully supports HTML 3.2.

The large browser manufacturers have introduced other tags, that aren't included in the HTML 3.2 standard. AWeb will try to support most of these non-standard extensions.

To make things even more inconvenient, some earlier versions of popular PC browsers didn't stick to the SGML rules. And even recent versions of those browsers still have problems with SGML comments. Because many people design their pages using these browsers, there are many documents on the web that just are bad HTML.

HTML modes

AWeb does its best to display all pages correctly, but sometimes you have to set the way HTML should be interpreted to get the best results.

You can choose out of three HTML modes:

Strict In strict HTML mode, AWeb understands only the proposed HTML 3.2 standard.
Tolerant In tolerant HTML mode, AWeb understands also other extensions. These are both extensions specific to other browsers, and HTML 3.0 extensions that can't be found in HTML 3.2.
Also, in tolerant mode some commonly made HTML errors are correctly understood (like leaving out <TD> in a table or putting <FORM> between <TABLE> and <TR>).
Compatible In compatible HTML mode (a nice way of formulating "buggy"), AWeb tries to interpret buggy HTML. Below is a description of the deviations of the standard when compatibility mode is used.
Set one of these in the Options page in the browser settings.

Strict	In strict HTML mode, AWeb understands only the proposed HTML 3.2 standard.
Tolerant	In tolerant HTML mode, AWeb understands also other extensions. These are both extensions specific to other browsers, and HTML 3.0 extensions that can't be found in HTML 3.2. Also, in tolerant mode some commonly made HTML errors are correctly understood (like leaving out <TD> in a table or putting <FORM> between <TABLE> and <TR>).
Compatible	In compatible HTML mode (a nice way of formulating "buggy"), AWeb tries to interpret buggy HTML. Below is a description of the deviations of the standard when compatibility mode is used.

The overview of supported HTML mentions with each HTML tag or attribute in which mode it is recognized.

Compatible mode

As mentioned above, some pages contain bad HTML. When you view such a page, it can look distorted. You can expect large parts of the page missing, links to URLs that seem to contain HTML tags, and other strange things.

If you encounter such problems, try using the compatible HTML mode of AWeb. Warning: Using compatible HTML mode, documents containing valid HTML might look distorted in turn.

In compatible mode, AWeb exposes the following deviations from the SGML standard:

quoted attribute values are terminated by any occurrence of ">"
quoted attributes that contain URLs, like HREF, SRC and ACTION, are terminated by whitespace
comments are terminated by any occurrence of "->"

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