FYI: Origins of the HTML 2.0 spec

Daniel W. Connolly ([email protected])
Tue, 10 Oct 1995 19:38:16 -0400

Now that the HTML 2.0 spec (weighing in at 71 pages) has been ratified
as Proposed Standard, I got a kick out of reviewing one of the first
drafts of an HTML specification:

http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/old-9508/Connolly/921130/MarkUp.html

The bulk of it is a by-example implementors guide. I distributed some
ANSI C source code to implement it too. Unfortunately, I changed jobs
just before I got a chance to send my Mosaic patches to NCSA. Some of
the bugs I mentioned in that guide (processing instructions) are still
around in implementations today.

The libHTML.tar.gz distribution mentioned therein isn't available
now, but most of the code is available in an html2mif distribution
I updated recently:

ftp://ftp.w3.org/pub/contrib/html2mif-19950714.tar.gz

Unfortunately, the work of getting all the HTML implementations to
interoperate now is MUCH bigger than it was back in '92.

Dan