Websnob > HTML 3.0

HTML 3.0: Seven Years Later

The W3O's HTML 3.0 specification was our last, best hope for a semantically-oriented HTML. It failed.

Why did it fail? Because Microsoft and Netscape refused to implement HTML 3.0's best features in their browsers. They were too busy with their own standards war to care about improving HTML, so HTML 3.0 withered and died on the vine.

Now, those of us who want a semantic web hang our hopes on HTML 4.01, Cascading Style Sheets, and Tim Berners-Lee.

The mini-tutorials in this section of Websnob don't have a place in today's Web. They're left over the day when I thought HTML 3.0 had a chance. Inspired by Dan Connolly's seminal article Toward Graceful Deployment of Tables in HTML, this websnob devised some backwards-compatible implementations of useful HTML 3.0 elements. I don't know if anybody used this advice, but I'm leaving the pages up because I don't like removing information from the web if I don't have to.

The BANNER element was for creating non-scrolling headers and footers.
The BQ and CREDIT elements allowed for easier quoting and crediting of blockquotes.
The FN element allows for pop-up footnotes.
The NOTE element designates areas of high-priority text.

None of these elements exist in HTML 4.01 or XHTML, and none of them ever will, so don't get excited about them, OK? Even these don't always validate at perfect HTML 3.0, because some of the advertisements use HTML 4.0.