Collection of Internet/Collection of Internet.iso/infosrvr/dev/www_talk.930/[e-mail] _Tue May 25 18:37:30 1993.msg

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From: Dave_Raggett <[e-mail]>
Message-Id: <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re HMML?
To: [e-mail]
Date: Tue, 25 May 93 17:59:49 BST
Cc: [e-mail]
Mailer: Elm [revision: 66.36.1.1]

Pei,

> Say, how is it going with HTML2/HMML DTD? Are you building on top of
> HMML or HTML DTD? In a few days Im getting back to HMML DTD thing again,
> so Im interested in your progress on the DTD.

Thanks for your interest, and for sending me your DTD. I really like the
change to the container model, and other SGML experts have told me that as a
rule, it is much better for verification purposes. A separate advantage is
that it allows you to make link destinations pick out a much wider variety of
containers than the <A NAME=foo> element, which is restricted to text and
inline emphasis.

My main objective is backwards compatibility with existing HTML. The change
to the container model shouldn't effect such documents. Another objective is
to provide support for groupings of HTML documents that form on-line books,
magazines, journals and conference proceedings etc. The idea here is to
provide presentation independent markup as a basis for:

    o   indexing based upon markup (title/author/subject, topics, ...)
    o   familiar navigation model (tables of contents, indexes, ...)
    o   printing related information (not just the current document)
    o   importing books, etc into the web

These extensions must be compatible with being able to parse HTML+ efficiently
using modest programs (unlike HyTime!). I am currently analysing a wide range
of paper material to see whether these documents can be adequately described
using just a few new tags.

Some things are clearly too arbitary, and would need to be described as
embedded figures using another format, e.g. Postscript or Computer Graphics
Metafile.

Other extensions to HTML add:

    o   tables (as an extension to definition lists)
    o   embedded images/drawings (Mosaic's <IMG> tag + ISMAP)
    o   forms (input fields and selection menus)
    o   nested lists
    o   change bars
    o   floating panels
    o   a few new semantic tags for indexing purposes

It would also be great to add support for annotations of various kinds, with
forward references from documents to responses etc. Further work is needed to
clarify the implications for the markup language. Anyone like to take this on?

You can see the current state of the DTD in:

    ftp://15.254.100.100/pub/hmml.dtd

Please remember that it is still at an early stage of development, so don't
expect too much consistency or completeness right now. Comments are welcome.

I appologise to those people who couldn't get access to hplose.hpl.hp.com
and have asked our support people to get it registered with the name server.

Let me know if you still can't access this file.

If we can get this right, the opportunity is there to make the Web as common
place as FTP is now. What will the effects (and problems) be when there are
millions of servers?

Best wishes,

    Dave Raggett,

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