4WWW95: HTML V3.0

the current version of the HTML standard is V2.0 !

open issues for the next version(s) of the HTML standard:

open issues are currently:

• style sheets
• the FORM tag needs to be reviewed
• frames need to be standardized
• Compound Document Architecture (CDA)
• implementation of mathematical formulas
• client side content negotiation

there is also a wishlist of less important issues:

• better names
• pop-ups
• fold and unfold of headers and lists
• layers and non-recursive inserts
• down loadable fonts
• more professional printing capabilities
• richer style sheets

some proposed extensions in more detail:

1. INSERT tag:
   allows to insert multi-media objects into HTML documents. more precisely, this tag allows a browser to detect if it supports the media type of the object embedded in the document. there is a joint development between Microsoft, NetScape, Sun, Spyglass and IBM with a lot of suggested attributes.

2. style sheets:
   here is a proposal for style sheets which supports style elements in the HEAD and style attributes in the BODY of a document. this would allow to define character styles, paragraph styles and so on.

3. TABLE tag:
   there are two different proposals from NetScape and the Department of Defense (DoD). a draft specification from the W3C will be available soon. the basic tags are TR for "Table Row", TH for "Table Header cell" and TD for "Table Data cell". there will be means to group rows and columns. various attributes are suggested, such as: WIDTH (cell width), ALIGN (horizontal alignment), VALIGN (vertical alignment), FRAME (border around the table), RULES (borders between cells) and many more. see also tutorial about tables, forms and cgi scripts.

4. RESOURCE tag:
   describes documents and images.

5. VARIANT tag:
   adds support for multiple languages.