HTML DTDs (and other public text)
HTML is an application of SGML (Standard Generalized
Markup Language), because SGML is an open standard that facilitates structured
documents. Unlike LaTeX, troff, or RTF, SGML has no universal "tag set."
In stead, each application of SGML defines its own tags in a DTD, or Document
Type Definition. An SGML DTD rigoriously specifies the structure of a type
of document. For example, the HTML 2.0 DTD specifies that a document has
a HEAD and a BODY; the HEAD contains a TITLE, and the BODY contains H1, H2,
P, ADDRESS, elements, and so on.
HTML Dialects: Features, Extensions, and DTDs
A number of HTML extensions have been proposed in
various HTML discussion forums. Unfortunately,
some of them have been deployed without accompanying documentation in the
form of a DTD.
DTDs (especially DTD modules, see below) describing those features are solicited.
Please send them to www-html, or html-wg.
See also: HTML Specs, Drafts, and Reports
Newest first:
- experimental HTML DTD July 96
- including style sheets, scripting, the object tag,
internationalization and some extensions to forms.
-
HTML 3.2 May 1996
-
In pre-release form
-
Inserting objects into
HTML3 Working Draft 22 Apr 96
-
Dave Raggett et. al.
-
The HTML3 Table Model W3C Working
Draft 23-Jan-96
-
@@link to DTD
-
A Modular DTD Approach
for HTML Specification In Progress: Jan 19, 1996
-
Murray Altheim <murray@stonehand.com>
-
Internationalization
of the Hypertext Markup Language Internet Draft 7 Feb 1996
-
F. Yergeau, G. Nicol, G. Adams, M. Duerst.
-
Netscape
SCRIPT tags Jan 1996?
-
Netscape Navigator 2.0beta3 adds SCRIPT element and attribute, plus onclick
etc. attributes.
-
A
Proposed Extension to HTML : Client-Side Image Maps Internet Draft
01 Dec 1995
-
James L. Seidman, Spyglass
-
Form-based
File Upload in HTML, Experimental RFC, November 1995
-
E. Nebel and L. Masinter, Xerox
-
DTD for Netscape Frames markup
In Progress: 20 Sep 1995.
-
Joe English, Note that this
is not a Netscape-supplied document.
-
frames.dtd, the Frames
Document Type Definition.
-
catalog, an SGML Open
TR9401 style catalog entry for the DTD.
-
alexed.html, a modified
(validated) copy of Alex Edelstein's home page, which references the new
DTD (and with other markup errors corrected).
-
test.html, another
example FRAMES document, taken from the proposal posted to www-html and html-wg.
-
Netscape
extensions to HTML 3.0
-
@@Netscape 2.0? extensions: HTML3 tags like BIG, SMALL, plus FONT FACE
-
Microsoft Internet
Explorer 1.0 HTML extensions 1995 (exact date unknown)
-
@@
-
LOWSRC
-
@@ Is this documented anywhere? Netscape?
-
X-ALTSRC
-
@@Who's is this?
-
Bulletin
-
@@ Firstfloor
-
HTML 2.0 November, 1995 IETF Proposed
Standard
-
This is the public text that appears in RFC1866.
-
-
HotJava DTD
24 July 1995
-
I have taken the HTML 3.0 DTD dated 16 Mar 95 and added the APP element
introduced by Sun Microsystems Corp. to accomodate their Java/HotJava WWW
application environment.
Revisions made by: Mark Gaither (markg@hal.com)
Original Author: Dave Raggett <dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
-
full DTD, based on HTML 3.0 with Java APP tag.
-
Mozilla DTD
27 Oct. 1994
-
Mark Gaither and Dan Connolly
-
full DTD,
based on HTML 2.0 with some Netscape 1.1 extensions.
-
Netscape
EXTENSIONS TO HTML 2.0 1994 (exact date unknown)
-
These extensions were instruduced in the Netscape 1.1 beta releases.
-
HTML 3.0 Expired
-
@@
-
Mosaic
for X version 2.0 Fill-Out Form Support
-
introduction of FORMS into HTML
-
Imagemaps
-
new idiom: <A href=xxx><IMG ISMAP></a>
-
IMG
-
@@
-
HTML 1.0 DTD March 1993
-
@@
-
About HTML
-
@@ TimBL's original spec. Still available?
What is a DTD good for?
First and foremost, it codifies an agreement among the community about the
structure of documents -- in this case, HTML documents.
Additionally, it allows us to:
-
Validate that a document has no syntactic
or structural errors
-
Visualize the document structure. (I'd like to see this made into a web
service as well!)
-
Convert to and from HTML in an automated fashion with confidence
Aids to Understanding
SGML syntax is somewhat obscure, but at the end of the day, it's pretty similar
to a context-free grammar. If you're a programmer, you probably deal with
CFGs all the time (you may know them as BNF grammars, or railroad-diagrams,
but they're all the same). If you're not a programmer, you deal with CFGs
all the time, but it's subconscous! See:
-
SGML and the Web
-
especially: Robin Cover's edited
collection of SGML materials
-
perlsgml
-
@@This is an analysis of the HTML 2.0 DTD maintained by
Earl Hood. It does a better job of
showing inclusion and exclusion exceptions than the reference above. It's
a bit out of date, last I checked.
To compund matters, HTML is evolving continuously. It's a super-human job
to keep track of it all. For one pretty good attempt, see:
-
HTML Reference
Manual In progress: 2 January 1996
-
Michael J. Hannah, Sandia National Laboratories mjhanna@sandia.gov
Daniel W. Connolly
$Id: Overview.html,v 1.8 1996/12/09 03:28:38 jigsaw Exp $