Margin notes to “HTML 4.0 in Netscape and Explorer” (2000)
jkorpela.fi
jkorpela.fi
The HTML 4.0 specification is a huge, intensely technical document that contains hundreds of different elements and can have all sorts of applications. It is at times difficult to understand. This is not an error on behalf of the authors. In fact, very few people are expected to read the specification; HTML was originally intended to be a document format that the author wouldn't learn or see, but something that would be created by programs designed for this task.
First, the specification can be called large, but hardly huge. It does not contain hundreds of elements, at least if the word "element" is taken in the sense that it is used in the specification. It is hardly true that very few people are expected to read it. The specification contains several introductory and tutorial parts - many of them rather good - which obviously imply that it was written for a wide audience. And the specification itself says, in its About the HTML 4.0 Specification part:
> This document has been written with two types of readers in mind: authors and implementors. We hope the specification will provide authors with the tools they need to write efficient, attractive, and accessible documents, without over-exposing them to HTML's implementation details.
And who says HTML was not intended to be writeable and readable by humans? There seems to a rumor that Tim Berners-Lee himself has said something like that, but if that's true, perhaps someone did not get the joke.
https://web.archive.org/web/20000517232106/http://webreferen...
Digging around a bit more, the original webreference.com (along with this article) existed until around April 2020. It's since been replaced by a generic landing page with a prompt to "subscribe to be the first to know when we relaunch". Shame that the article's URL doesn't work anymore after being maintained for 22 years. I imagine the domain was sold or something?
https://web.archive.org/web/20200330143723/http://webreferen...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/me...
Should we all be sharing these inner questions?