idnits 2.17.1
draft-connolly-text-html-01.txt:
Checking boilerplate required by RFC 5378 and the IETF Trust (see
https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info):
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Looks like you're using RFC 2026 boilerplate. This must be updated to
follow RFC 3978/3979, as updated by RFC 4748.
Checking nits according to https://www.ietf.org/id-info/1id-guidelines.txt:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Missing expiration date. The document expiration date should appear on
the first and last page.
** The document seems to lack a 1id_guidelines paragraph about
Internet-Drafts being working documents.
** The document seems to lack a 1id_guidelines paragraph about 6 months
document validity -- however, there's a paragraph with a matching
beginning. Boilerplate error?
== The page length should not exceed 58 lines per page, but there was 1
longer page, the longest (page 1) being 325 lines
Checking nits according to https://www.ietf.org/id-info/checklist :
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
** The document seems to lack an IANA Considerations section. (See Section
2.2 of https://www.ietf.org/id-info/checklist for how to handle the case
when there are no actions for IANA.)
** The document seems to lack separate sections for Informative/Normative
References. All references will be assumed normative when checking for
downward references.
** The document seems to lack a both a reference to RFC 2119 and the
recommended RFC 2119 boilerplate, even if it appears to use RFC 2119
keywords.
RFC 2119 keyword, line 196: '...E "text" subtype MUST always represent...'
RFC 2119 keyword, line 198: '... in MIME "text" MUST represent a line...'
== The 'Obsoletes: ' line in the draft header should list only the
_numbers_ of the RFCs which will be obsoleted by this document (if
approved); it should not include the word 'RFC' in the list.
-- The draft header indicates that this document obsoletes RFC1866, but the
abstract doesn't seem to directly say this. It does mention RFC1866
though, so this could be OK.
-- The draft header indicates that this document obsoletes RFC1867, but the
abstract doesn't seem to directly say this. It does mention RFC1867
though, so this could be OK.
-- The draft header indicates that this document obsoletes RFC1980, but the
abstract doesn't seem to directly say this. It does mention RFC1980
though, so this could be OK.
-- The draft header indicates that this document obsoletes RFC2070, but the
abstract doesn't seem to directly say this. It does mention RFC2070
though, so this could be OK.
Miscellaneous warnings:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
== The copyright year in the RFC 3978 Section 5.4 Copyright Line does not
match the current year
-- The document seems to lack a disclaimer for pre-RFC5378 work, but may
have content which was first submitted before 10 November 2008. If you
have contacted all the original authors and they are all willing to grant
the BCP78 rights to the IETF Trust, then this is fine, and you can ignore
this comment. If not, you may need to add the pre-RFC5378 disclaimer.
(See the Legal Provisions document at
https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info for more information.)
-- The document date (October 13, 1999) is 8954 days in the past. Is this
intentional?
Checking references for intended status: Informational
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Obsolete normative reference: RFC 1866 (ref. 'HTML20') (Obsoleted by RFC
2854)
** Obsolete normative reference: RFC 1867 (ref. 'UPLOAD') (Obsoleted by RFC
2854)
** Obsolete normative reference: RFC 1942 (ref. 'TABLES') (Obsoleted by RFC
2854)
** Obsolete normative reference: RFC 1980 (ref. 'CLIMAPS') (Obsoleted by
RFC 2854)
** Obsolete normative reference: RFC 2070 (ref. 'I18N') (Obsoleted by RFC
2854)
** Obsolete normative reference: RFC 2388 (ref. 'FORMDATA') (Obsoleted by
RFC 7578)
** Obsolete normative reference: RFC 2396 (ref. 'URI') (Obsoleted by RFC
3986)
** Obsolete normative reference: RFC 2616 (ref. 'HTTP') (Obsoleted by RFC
7230, RFC 7231, RFC 7232, RFC 7233, RFC 7234, RFC 7235)
Summary: 15 errors (**), 0 flaws (~~), 3 warnings (==), 6 comments (--).
Run idnits with the --verbose option for more detailed information about
the items above.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 Internet-Draft D. Connolly
2 World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
3 Category: Informational L. Masinter
4 Xerox Corporation
5 draft-connolly-text-html-01.txt October 13, 1999
6 Obsoletes: RFC 1866, RFC 2070, RFC 1980, RFC 1867, RFC 1942
8 The 'text/html' Media Type
10 Status of this Memo
12 This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with
13 all provisions of Section 10 of RFC 2026.
15 This document is an Internet-Draft. Internet-Drafts are working
16 documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas,
17 and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute
18 working documents as Internet-Drafts.
20 Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six
21 months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other
22 documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts
23 as reference material or to cite them other than as ``work in
24 progress''.
26 The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at
27 http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt
29 The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at
30 http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html.
32 Copyright Notice
34 Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1999). All Rights Reserved.
36 Abstract
38 This document summarizes the history of HTML development, and
39 defines the "text/html" MIME type by pointing to the relevant W3C
40 recommendations; it is intended to obsolete the previous IETF
41 documents defining HTML, including RFC 1866, RFC 1867, RFC 1980,
42 RFC 1942 and RFC 2070, and to remove HTML from IETF Standards
43 Track.
45 This document was prepared at the request of the W3C HTML working
46 group. Please send comments to www-html@w3.org, a public mailing
47 list with archive at
48 .
50 1. Introduction and background
52 HTML has been in use in the World Wide Web information
53 infrastructure since 1990, and specified in various informal
54 documents. The text/html media type was first officially defined
55 by the IETF HTML working group in 1995 in [HTML20]. Extensions to
56 HTML were proposed in [HTML30], [UPLOAD], [TABLES], [CLIMAPS], and
57 [I18N].
59 The HTML working group closed Sep 1996, and work on defining HTML
60 moved to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The proposed
61 extensions were incorporated to some extent in [HTML32], and to a
62 larger extent in [HTML40]. The definition of multipart/form-data
63 from [UPLOAD] was described in [FORMDATA]. In addition, a
64 reformulation of HTML 4.0 in XML 1.0 is being developed [XHTML1].
66 [HTML32] notes "This specification defines HTML version 3.2. HTML
67 3.2 aims to capture recommended practice as of early '96 and as
68 such to be used as a replacement for HTML 2.0 (RFC 1866)."
69 Subsequent specifications for HTML describe the differences in each
70 version.
72 In addition to the development of standards, a wide variety of
73 additional extensions, restrictions, and modifications to HTML were
74 popularized by NCSA's Mosaic system and subsequently by the
75 competitive implementations of Netscape Navigator and Microsoft
76 Internet Explorer; these extensions are documented in numerous
77 books and online guides.
79 2. Registration of MIME media type text/html
81 MIME media type name: text
82 MIME subtype name: html
83 Required parameters: none
84 Optional parameters:
86 charset
87 The optional parameter "charset" refers to the character
88 encoding used to represent the HTML document as a sequence of
89 bytes. Any registered IANA charset may be used, but UTF-8 is
90 preferred. Although this parameter is optional, it is strongly
91 recommended that it always be present. See Section 6 below
92 for a discussion of charset default rules.
94 Note that [HTML20] included an optional "level" parameter; in
95 practice, this parameter was never used and has been removed from
96 this specification. [HTML30] also suggested a "version"
97 parameter; in practice, this parameter also was never used and
98 has been removed from this specification.
100 Encoding considerations:
101 See Section 4 of this document.
103 Security considerations:
104 See Section 7 of this document.
106 Interoperability considerations:
107 HTML is designed to be interoperable across the widest possible
108 range of platforms and devices of varying capabilities. However,
109 there are contexts (platforms of limited display capability, for
110 example) where not all of the capabilities of the full HTML
111 definition are feasible. There is ongoing work to develop both a
112 modularization of HTML and a set of profiling capabilities to
113 identify and negotiate restricted (and extended) capabilities.
115 Due to the long and distributed development of HTML, current
116 practice on the Internet includes a wide variety of HTML
117 variants. Implementors of text/html interpreters must be prepared
118 to be "bug-compatible" with popular browsers in order to work
119 with many HTML documents available the Internet.
121 Typically, different versions are distinguishable by the DOCTYPE
122 declaration contained within them, although the DOCTYPE
123 declaration itself is sometimes omitted or incorrect.
125 Published specification:
126 The text/html media type is now defined by W3C Recommendations;
127 the latest published version is [HTML40]. As of this writing, a
128 revision, HTML 4.01 [HTML401], is being developed as a revision.
129 In addition, [XHTML1], also a work in progress, defines a profile
130 of use of XHTML which is compatible with HTML 4.0 and which may
131 also be labeled as text/html.
133 Applications which use this media type:
134 The first and most common application of HTML is the World Wide
135 Web; commonly, HTML documents contain URI references [URI] to
136 other documents and media to be retrieved using the HTTP protocol
137 [HTTP]. Many gateway applications provide HTML-based interfaces
138 to other underlying complex services. Numerous other applications
139 now also use HTML as a convenient platform-independent multimedia
140 document representation.
142 Additional information:
144 Magic number:
145 There is no single initial string that is always present for
146 HTML files. However, Section 5 below gives some guidelines
147 for recognizing HTML files.
149 File extension:
150 The file extensions 'html' or 'htm' are commonly used, but
151 other extensions denoting file formats for preprocessing are
152 also common.
154 Macintosh File Type code: HTML
156 Person & email address to contact for further information:
157 Dan Connolly
158 Larry Masinter
160 Intended usage: COMMON
162 Author/Change controller:
163 The HTML specification is a work product of the World Wide Web
164 Consortium's HTML Working Group. The W3C has change control over
165 the HTML specification.
167 Further information:
168 HTML has a means of including, by reference via URI, additional
169 resources (image, video clip, applet) within the base
170 document. In order to transfer a complete HTML object and the
171 included resources in a single MIME object, the mechanisms of
172 [MHTML] may be used.
174 3. Fragment Identifiers
176 The URI specification [URI] notes that the semantics of a fragment
177 identifier (part of a URI after a "#") is a property of the data
178 resulting from a retrieval action, and that the format and
179 interpretation of fragment identifiers is dependent on the media
180 type of the retrieval result.
182 For documents labeled as text/html, the fragment identifier
183 designates the correspondingly named A element (named with a "name"
184 attribute), or any other element (named with the an "id"
185 attribute); this is described in detail in [HTML40] section 12.
187 4. Encoding considerations
189 Because of the availability within HTML itself for using character
190 entity references for non-ASCII characters, it is possible that
191 text/html documents with a wide repertoire of characters may be
192 transported without encoding. However, transport of text/html using
193 a charset other than US-ASCII may require base64 or
194 quoted-printable encoding for 7-bit channels.
196 The canonical form of any MIME "text" subtype MUST always represent
197 a line break as a CRLF sequence. Similarly, any occurrence of CRLF
198 in MIME "text" MUST represent a line break. Use of CR and LF
199 outside of line break sequences is also forbidden. This rule
200 applies regardless of format or character set or sets involved.
202 Note, however, that HTTP allows the transport of data not in
203 canonical form, and, in particular, with other end-of-line
204 conventions; see [HTTP] section 3.7.1. This exception is commonly
205 used for HTML.
207 HTML sent via email is still subject to the MIME restrictions; this
208 is discussed fully in [MHTML] Section 10.
210 5. Recognizing HTML files
212 Almost all HTML files have the string ".
274 [HTML20] "Hypertext Markup Language - 2.0." T. Berners-Lee &
275 D. Connolly. RFC 1866. November 1995. Additional information
276 available at .
278 [UPLOAD] "Form-based File Upload in HTML." E. Nebel & L. Masinter. RFC
279 1867. November 1995.
281 [TABLES] "HTML Tables." D. Raggett. RFC 1942. May 1996.
283 [CLIMAPS] "A Proposed Extension to HTML : Client-Side Image Maps."
284 J. Seidman. RFC 1980. August 1996.
286 [MIME] "Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part Two: Media
287 Types." N. Freed & N. Borenstein. November 1996. RFC 2046.
289 [HTML32] "HTML 3.2 Reference Specification." Dave Raggett. W3C
290 Recomendation. 14 January 1997. Available at
291 .
293 [I18N] "Internationalization of the Hypertext Markup Language." RFC
294 2070. F. Yergeau, G. Nicol, G. Adams, M. Duerst. January
295 1997.
297 [FORMDATA] "Returning Values from Forms: multipart/form-data". RFC
298 2388. L. Masinter. August 1998.
300 [HTML40] "HTML 4.0 Specification." Raggett, Le Hors, Jacobs. W3C
301 Recommendation. 18 Dec 1997. Available at
302 .
304 [HTML401] "HTML 4.01 Specification." D. Raggett, A. Le Hors,
305 I. Jacobs. W3C Proposed Recommendation (work in progress),
306 August 1999. Available at
307 .
309 [XHTML1] "XHTML 1.0: The Extensible HyperText Markup Language: A
310 Reformulation of HTML 4.0 in XML 1.0." W3C HTML Working
311 Group. W3C Proposed Recommendation (work in progress). August
312 1999. Available at .
314 [MHTML] "MIME Encapsulation of Aggregate Documents, such as
315 HTML (MHTML)". J. Palme, A. Hopmann, N. Shelness.
316 March 1999. RFC 2557.
318 [URI] "Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax."
319 T. Berners-Lee, R. Fielding, L. Masinter. August 1998,
320 RFC 2396.
322 [HTTP] "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1." R. Fielding,
323 J. Gettys, J. Mogul, H. Frystyk, L. Masinter, P. Leach,
324 T. Berners-Lee. June 1999.RFC 2616.