Re: LYNX-DEV Lynx 2.6 and HTML version

[David Woolley]

> 
> I'm using Lynx 2.3.7 for a while and would like to have a better support of 
> the
> HTML language. Is Lynx 2.6 able to fully support BOTH HTML 2 and HTML 3 files
> (using a VT220 terminal)?

Define fully support.  As I understand it, Lynx supports them more fully than
Netscape or MSIE, in the sense that it recognizes more of the language, and
recognizes HTML 3.0.  Netscape's HTML 3.2 omits features which were in
the HTML 3.0 standard (this whole area is a mess with commercial interests
dictating things, not standards).

However, there are some things which are difficult to do sensibly on 
a character cell terminal (images, image maps, frames) and there are
some things that are incompatible with the code structure (complete 
support for tables [1]- however tables are handled much better than the
obsolete version you are using).

> BTW, how HTML 2 and HTML 3 files are they differentiated? By the extension
> (".html" for HTML 2 and ".htm" for HTML 3)?

By an SGML directive at the beginning of the file, specifying the 
Document Type Definition used.  Note that well designed HTML 3.x documents
are also meaningful HTML 2 documents; the additional tags and attributes
are simply ignored - many current pages are well designed.

.htm stands for "hyper text markup (whoops my operating system has to
have 8.3 format file names)!"  (Filename extensions on the web do not
matter, it is the text/html that is returned in the headers by the
server, and the content of the document that does.)  The extension is
totally unrelated to the HTML versions, except in as much as the move to
Microsoft based clients correlates with the move away from being a
simple logical markup language to a desk top publishing page description
language - representing, I think, a rather different market for MS than 
for Unix.

[1] Tables are often too wide to sensibly represent on a character cell
display, even if it could easily be done in one pass.
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