| Main Index | Top Of Tree | Tag Index | Tag History |
|---|
|
In The Beginning...: The Concept
The concept for this site came together during the course of many months at work when I needed to access the many different and sometimes hard to find references on all the different parts of HTML. I ended up with many different references, both hard copy and electronic, with links as well to different sites that would help in my quest. Sometimes these references disagreed with each other. Sometimes they just didn't have the right information. There were other times when I wanted a good tutorial on PROPER usage of a tag created by a browser company, and the references that existed were either non-existent or very poor. Thinking that I wasn't alone, I started compiling information on each tag. This took longer than I expected, to say the least. 8-} Getting in Deeper Water: Tag History When I neared the finish of gathering information on each tag, I saw a gap (a BIG gap!) in one other area; People on USENET kept asking for some sort of list about which tags were supported by which browsers. No one seemed to have the proper answer. I happened upon Stephen LeHunte's HTML Reference Library, which is an EXCELLENT reference in and of its own by the way, and found something like what everyone was looking for. I was going to incorporate this basic idea into my site, but I then had an idea to expand upon it. The problem: If you look at any browser hit statistics that exist for large sites, you will find that people are still using pre-1.0 releases of Netscape and other older browsers. There are also quite a lot of people who are using Netscape 1.2, which does not have nearly as many features as the current Navigator version. The point is, people are not always upgrading, but authors are often quick to forget the more limited capabilities of older browsers. What also struck me was that I could find NO coherent history of tag support anywhere in print or on the web. The task of manually verifying all this on the scale I intended did not sound, nor was it, easy. Netscape and Internet Explorer verification was not so bad, because there was quite a bit of documentation on the web and little change was made between first alpha/beta to final release of any of their browsers. Then we have Mosaic. Mosaic has plenty of documentation for each release, but almost nowhere does it specify what NEW tags are supported in each release. There were no less than 15 releases of Mosaic in the PC version of the 2.0 product cycle, and I ended up having to find EVERY one of these versions to manually verify when many of these tags were supported. Now I can see why approaching this problem in this manner has not been done before. =) While We're At It: HTML History While doing this, it occurred to me that very little documented history in general exists about both browsers AND the HTML specifications of old. Once a new version is out, the old stuff is generally forgotten or ignored. I realize that the time span I cover (about 2 years worth) is short, but already the details are disappearing into the mist. Hopefully someone will get some use out of this, the resource I was looking for before I set out to create this site. |
|---|