on this site:
Home
HTML 2.0
HTML 4.0
Other sites I've done:
Metamorphosis Glassworks
New Age
Microsoft uses Unix
HTML 3.2, now consisting of 71 tags, became the "official" standard in January of '97.
HTML now included such features as background images, tables, applets, text-flow around images, font colors & sizes, and superscripts & subscripts, while still providing backward compatibility with the existing HTML 2.0 Standard.
The intent for HTML was to have been a document structuring language; not a page formatting language. Yet many of the new features were exactly that. They were strictly for controlling the presentation of the document rather than for any logical structure... and even at that, different browsers rendered tables differently. Netscape shifted table contents a few pixels to the right while Explorer shifted table contents several pixels to the left.
People who were aware of this started inserting "spacer.gif" graphics or empty tables to try to accomodate the various browsers. See some screenshots of this page in various browsers.
|
Modems had been upgraded to 14.4 and 28.8 kbps, so people were ever more tempted to include larger graphics, including animations and advertisements, which would never have been tolerated on slower connections. |
| This is also the time when more and more computers were equipped with sound cards and speakers "out of the box," so naturally web developers wanted to take advantage of that new aspect as well. HTML 3.2 allowed for clicking a sound file, but developers wanted to have a sound play automatically when the web page loaded, which wouldn't be incorporated until HTML 4.0. (Neither Netscape nor Microsoft waited around though. They had both already implemented their own ways of including background music.) |
