IETF
HyperText Markup Language (HTML) Working Group

Requests for Comments

RFC 1866. Proposed Standard
"HyperText Markup Language Specification -- 2.0",
T. Berners-Lee and D. Connolly, November 1995.
Abstract
The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is a simple markup language used to create hypertext documents that are platform independent. HTML documents are SGML documents with generic semantics that are appropriate for representing information from a wide range of domains. HTML markup can represent hypertext news, mail, documentation, and hypermedia; menus of options; database query results; simple structured documents with in-lined graphics; and hypertext views of existing bodies of information.

HTML has been in use by the World Wide Web (WWW) global information initiative since 1990. This specification roughly corresponds to the capabilities of HTML in common use prior to June 1994. HTML is an application of ISO Standard 8879:1986 Information Processing Text and Office Systems; Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML).

The `text/html' Internet Media Type (RFC 1590) and MIME Content Type (RFC 1521) is defined by this specification.

RFC 1867. Experimental
"Form-based File Upload in HTML",
E. Nebel and L. Masinter, November 1995.
Abstract
Currently, HTML forms allow the producer of the form to request information from the user reading the form. These forms have proven useful in a wide variety of applications in which input from the user is necessary. However, this capability is limited because HTML forms don't provide a way to ask the user to submit files of data. Service providers who need to get files from the user have had to implement custom user applications. (Examples of these custom browsers have appeared on the www-talk mailing list.) Since file-upload is a feature that will benefit many applications, this draft proposes an extension to HTML to allow information providers to express file upload requests uniformly, and a MIME compatible representation for file upload responses. This draft also includes a description of a backward compatibility strategy that allows new servers to interact with the current HTML user agents.
RFC 1942. Experimental
"HTML Tables",
Dave Raggett, May 1996.
Abstract
The HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a simple markup language used to create hypertext documents that are portable from one platform to another. HTML documents are SGML documents with generic semantics that are appropriate for representing information from a wide range of applications. This specification extends HTML to support a wide variety of tables. The model is designed to work well with associated style sheets, but does not require them. It also supports rendering to braille, or speech, and exchange of tabular data with databases and spreadsheets. The HTML table model embodies certain aspects of the CALS table model, e.g. the ability to group table rows into thead, tbody and tfoot sections, plus the ability to specify cell alignment compactly for sets of cells according to the context. This RFC is the product of the Hypertext Markup Language Working Group of the IETF.
RFC 2070. Proposed Standard
"Internationalization of the Hypertext Markup Language",
F. Yergeau, G. Nicol, G. Adams, M. Duerst, January 1997.
HTML DTD
SGML Declaration
Latin 1 Entities
BIDI Entities
Abstract
The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language used to create hypertext documents that are platform independent. Initially, the application of HTML on the World Wide Web was seriously restricted by its reliance on the ISO-8859-1 coded character set, which is appropriate only for Western European languages. Despite this restriction, HTML has been widely used with other languages, using other coded character sets or character encodings, at the expense of interoperability.

This document is meant to address the issue of the internationalization (i18n, i followed by 18 letters followed by n) of HTML by extending the specification of HTML and giving additional recommendations for proper internationalization support. A foremost consideration is to make sure that HTML remains a valid application of SGML, while enabling its use with all languages of the world.

Current work-in-progress:

Discussion of these and related topics takes place on the HTML working group mailing list <html-wg@oclc.org>. A hypertext archive of the mailing list is available.

Meeting Notes

Products of the Working Group

All current documents of the HTML WG have progressed to RFC status.

Historical Documents

Related Work

Roy Fielding <fielding@ics.uci.edu>
Department of Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine, CA 92717-3425
HTML 2.0 Checked! Last modified: 19 Nov 1997