Notes from WWW/TEI Meeting

This is a short report of a joint WWW/TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) meeting held at University College Cork, November 19-20, 1993.

Action Items/Recommendations

• HTML 1.0 should be documented to define the behavior of existing browsers, and should be frozen as agreed upon at the WWW Developers' Conference.
  • Features to be documented, implemented and specified include collapsing spaces, underline, alt attribute, BR, HR, ISMAP...
  • HTML IETF spec needs to be updated by CERN, as well as existing documentation
• HTML+ future browsers need not support HTML 1.0 features after a reasonable amount of time. As an aid in transition, the HTML+ spec/DTD will not include any deprecated features of HTML 1.0.
  • HTML 1.0 deprecated features
    • nextid
    • method, rel, rev, effect from <A> tag (but not from the <LINK> tag)
    • blockquote --> quote
    • There was a feeling that the <img> tag will be superceded by the <fig> tag, although its deprecation was not agreed upon.
    • menu list --> ul
    • dir list--> ul
• The intention of HTML+ is to support generic SGML-compliant authoring tools, and authors are recommended to use this software with the HTML+ DTD for the creation/maintenance of documents.
• Browsers may implement different levels of HTML+ conformance.
  • Level 0 implementation
    • HTML 1.0 spec referenced above
  • Level 1 implementation
    • Partial fill-out forms
    • New entity definitions (in section 5.1 of HTML+ draft)
  • Level 2 implementation
    • Additional presentation tags (sub, sup, strike) & logical emphasis
    • Full forms support (including type checking)
    • Generic emphasis tag
  • Level 3 implementation
    • Figures
    • NOTEs and admonishments
  • Further levels to be specified
• Authoring tools are expected to conform to the HTML+ DTD and are NOT to support deprecated features.
• We expect the HTML+ DTD to be developed incrementally. The HTML+ internet draft will make clear which features are now stable and which are still subject to change. The DTD will be structured to reflect this.
  1. HTML+ will work with the SGML reference concrete syntax.
  2. The entity sets will be user-specifiable (in the long run).
  3. HTML+ will support nested divisions or containers.
  4. There will be a number of new features

     Figures & Images

     <fig> may be able to subsume the role of <img>.

     Generic highlighting tag

     The <em> tag will be used with a set of three or four defined attributes to present a guaranteed-distinct presentation of these attributes.

     Generic roles

     Support for undefined elements (user extensions) (render)

     Tables

     This is now stable.

     Math

     for research

• HTML/TEI
  • It was felt the correct way to convert between TEI and HTML was to do it on the server side using a conversion filter.
  • This server will also provide a hypertext link to download the raw TEI text.
  • We (WWW developers and TEI people) will strive together to converge functionality between HTML* and TEI, as well as to produce this server/filter system.
• Links to:
  • HTML spec
  • HTML+ spec
  • TEI overview