The Document World: Come the Revolution (HTML)

• Human-authored
• Human text for humans to read
• Presentation-oriented
• Platform independent
• Vendor independent (more-or-less)
• Upgrade protected (more-or-less)
• Originally only pseudo-SGML, but grew up fast

And Now, The Bad News

• Sloppy HTML
  • makes life tough for programs
  • inconsistent interpretations
  • tag abuse
• Tag-of-the-month club
  • vendor N introduces <blink>; vendor M introduces <object>
• Demand for richer markup
  • support richer styling, indexing, etc.

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Copyright (c) 2001 Mary Holstege
All rights reserved.