Netscape recently announced their new browsers, the Netscape Navigator 2.0
and Netscape Navigator Gold 2.0. Both seem pretty impressive and they
will undoubtably have a great impact and I fear that the new features
they are creating become the ad hoc standards that will prove difficult
to undo.
One tag that struck me as not wanted/needed was the EMBED tag as it seems
to be just an IMG tag with no inline content type specified. I seem to
recall that the REL=embed attribute of the A tag could be used to specify
that the URL the link pointed to was to be embedded into the document.
When I tried looking for this in the HTML 3.0 standard I couldn't find it,
it just said that specifying values of REL was not part of the standard.
Personally I'd much prefer
<A REL=embed HREF="some_url">ajsdf</A>
to
<EMBED SRC="some_url" ALT="ajsdf">
(or <IMB SRC="some_url" ALT="ajsdf"> for that matter)
as this is both more backwards compatible and because the alternative,
text representation ("ajsdf" in the above example) can include any (?)
HTML.
If this were accepted, we could scrap both IMG and EMBED, though not
without loosing backwards compatibility of course.
Disclaimer: I haven't been participating in the HTML 3.0 standard so
I really don't know for sure if this is a silly suggestion.
Bye,
--
Bjørn Stabell <mailto::bjoerns@acm.org>
<http://www.cc.uit.no/~bjoerns/>