Re: text/x-html3

Bruce Gingery (bruce%tssslab@TotSysSoft.com)
Fri, 17 Feb 95 05:02:23 -0700


To the discussion, Jim Hammerly responded:

> Since browsers are supposed to be backwards-compatable,
> I don't think we want to distinguish between HTML 2.0
> and 3.0 (or 1.0 or 4.0..., for that matter) via a separate
> filetype, do we? I believe it should be sufficient to
> use the 3.0 doctype header.

Casey Palowitch quoted from the
(http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/html3-dtd.txt) HTML3 DTD...

-> "While HTML 3.0 is being discussed, please use text/x-html3
-> as a temporary MIME content type, as this will allow clients
-> to distinguish html 3 from current html documents."

and Dan Grillo responded...
> If text/x-html3 is the accepted mime-type, then we should
> use .htmld3 if we use anything at all. There's lots of
> MIME software that will take foo/x-bar -> something.bar

I quite agree with Jim. It should be up to the application
opening and typing the type-3 html (or whatever version) to get
it from the header and report/process/reject the related MIME
type or special handling required.


It was my understanding that browsers are supposed to ALSO be
reasonably forward compatible, ignoring any tags they don't
understand. While this doesn't make later-standard pages
directly usable, it should at least prevent the browsers (or
other apps) crashing from a tag they're not equipped to handle.