In order to design any new WWW feature which is useful and usable, it is imperative that it both work seamlessly with the existing systems and take advantage of the unique attributes of the Web which have made it so wide-spread and popular. Towards this goal, Interactive HTML attempts to address three key issues:
One of the most attractive things about the Web is the huge number of platforms and individual browsers which it is accessible from. Any new system which hopes to be successful must take into account the fact that browsers are used on everything from high-end graphics workstations to text-only terminals, and that there is a rapidly growing assortment of browsers available which must incorporate a new feature before it is practical for service providers to make wide-spread use of it.
In addition, new features must integrate smoothly with existing practice on the Web. The introduction of new HTML tags should be limited as much as possible, favoring existing tags whenever it is reasonable to do so. It is also important that any new extensions be as backwards-compatible as possible; ideally, they should be invisible to the user but, when this is not possible, they should at least not break unaware browsers when they are encountered.
Finally, it is imperative that any new features be capable of becoming a widely used standard. This means that the new WWW extensions and other external protocols must be documented well enough that they may be reasonably re-implemented by others. The Internet is ultimately dependent on well-defined standards which allow independently written applications running over it to work together reasonably seamlessly; this is a basic requirement for any system which expects to be widely deployed over the net.
| Dianne Kyra Hackborn <hackbod@angryredplanet.com> | Last modified: Wed Aug 14 16:04:38 PDT 1996 |