Network Working Group                                        D. Connolly
Internet-Draft                           World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
Category: Informational                                    November 1998
Updates: RFC 1866
<draft-connolly-text-html-00.txt>

The text/html Media Type

Status: NEWER DRAFT IN LAST CALL

Larry Masinter took this, revised it, and submitted it thru IETF channels; see: The 'text/html' Media Type, October 13, 1999. It's in IETF last call:

Please send any comments to the iesg@ietf.org or ietf@ietf.org mailing lists by November 10, 1999.
Last Call: The 'text/html' Media Type to Informational

This document has also been discussed in www-html@w3.org, a public mailing list with archive.

A Short History of HTML

The text/html media type was originally defined in [HTML20] in Nov 1995. Extensions to HTML were proposed in [HTML30], [UPLOAD], [TABLES], [CLIMAPS], and [I18N].

The IETF HTML working group closed Sep 1996, and work on HTML moved to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The extensions were incorporated, to some extent, in [HTML32], and to a larger extent, in [HTML40].

An excerpt from [HTML32]:

This specification defines HTML version 3.2. HTML 3.2 aims to capture recommended practice as of early '96 and as such to be used as a replacement for HTML 2.0 (RFC 1866).

A complete list of changes from version 3.2 to version 4.0 is contained in Appendix A: Changes in [HTML40].

The text/html media type is now defined by W3C recommendations; the latest version is [HTML40]. See section 4.3 The text/html content type.

Acknowledgements

Larry Masinter provided the original spark, and much encouragement since, for producing this document.

Author's Address

Daniel W. Connolly
World Wide Web Consortum (W3C)
MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
545 Technology Square
Cambridge, MA 02139, U.S.A.
phone:+1-512-310-2971
mailto:connolly@w3.org
http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

References

In chronological order:

[HTML30]
HyperText Markup Language Specification Version 3.0, Dave Raggett, September 1995. Internet Draft (expired)
Available at http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html3/CoverPage.
[HTML20]
Hypertext Markup Language - 2.0. T. Berners-Lee & D. Connolly. November 1995. (Status: PROPOSED STANDARD)
additional information available at http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/
[UPLOAD]
Form-based File Upload in HTML. E. Nebel & L. Masinter. November 1995. (Status: EXPERIMENTAL)
[TABLES]
HTML Tables. D. Raggett. May 1996. (Status: EXPERIMENTAL)
[CLIMAPS]
A Proposed Extension to HTML : Client-Side Image Maps. J. Seidman. August 1996. (Status: INFORMATIONAL)
[HTML32]
HTML 3.2 Reference Specification, Dave Raggett
W3C Recomendation 14 January 1997.
available at http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html32
[I18N]
Internationalization of the Hypertext Markup Language. F. Yergeau, G. Nicol, G. Adams, M. Duerst. January 1997. (Status: PROPOSED STANDARD)
[HTML40]
HTML 4.0 Specification, Raggett, Le Hors, Jacobs,
W3C Recommendation 18 Dec 1997
available at http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40