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Re: Books - what are the best references for HTML?
Subject:Re: Books - what are the best references for HTML? From:"Jeanne A. E. DeVoto" <jaed -at- BEST -dot- COM> Date:Thu, 16 Jul 1998 12:29:05 -0700
At 9:57 AM -0700 7/16/98, Steve Fouts wrote:
>Jeanne A. E. DeVoto <jaed -at- BEST -dot- COM> wrote:
>
>However, the [HTML] 3.2 book will tell you most of what you need; most
>additions
>>to the [HTML] 4.0 standard were proprietary Netscape/MSIE elements during
>the 3.2 period, and are covered as such in the 3.2 edition of the book.)
>
>This is dangerously untrue. First, many of the proprietary extensions to
>HTML were officially snubbed in HTML 4.0. That is, they are not mentioned
>at all.
I didn't say that most of the proprietary elements were adopted into 4.0; I
said that most of the elements adopted into 4.0 were previously proprietary
(and therefore are covered in a 3.2 book that discusses proprietary
extensions). There's a difference.
> Others were officially deprecated (more or less forcefully
>removed from the standard)
Deprecation does not mean "forcefully removed from the standard"; it means
adopted as part of the standard, along with the W3C's recommendation that
they be replaced with CSS. (However, support for CSS among actual browsers
is currently so poor that it is widely conceded that they are not now a
reasonable substitute for the deprecated elements in most situations.)
>In addition, HTML 4.0 supports more multimedia options, scripting
>languages, style sheets, better printing facilities, and documents
>that are more accessible to users with disabilities.
The <object> tag theoretically might support multimedia options if it were
well-supported by any existing browser, which at the moment it is not.
Scripting languages are not part of any HTML standard; while 4.0 does a
better job of recognizing (and ignoring) script inclusions, in practice the
only time this makes a difference is during validation, since no browser
makes actual use of the DTD. CSS is a separate standard. "Printing
facilities" are the domain of the browser. Accessibility does not depend on
the specific HTML standard a web designer marks up to.
Certainly someone doing HTML markup should be aware of the 4.0 spec and
consult it as needed. However, we were talking about recommendations for a
book to get a person started. For practical purposes, given the high
quality of Lemay's 3.2 edition, the difference in quality between the two
editions, and the fact that the 3.2 book covers a good 95% of the usable
new elements in the 4.0 standard, my recommendation stands.
>Saying that the 4.0 standard is just rubber stamping the factionalism
>introduced by Netscape and Microsoft is close to blasphemous
Eh?
Like the 3.2 standard (and unlike the lamented HTML 3.0), HTML 4.0 was
designed to reflect the "state of the art" of supported elements. It is not
"rubber stamping", in the sense that proprietary elements that were thought
to have been a bad idea were not included (witness the fate of <blink>).
But Microsoft and Netscape are probably the two most influential members of
the W3C, and the 4.0 standard reflects that fact.
(I won't get into the implications of using a word like "blasphemous" to
express your disagreement with someone's opinion on a technical standard.)
--
jeanne a. e. devoto ~ jaed -at- jaedworks -dot- com http://www.jaedworks.com
What does not kill us makes us stranger.
