Notes to "Introduction to Web Design | HTML"

The World Wide Web Consortium was founded in 1994 to develop common protocols for the evolution of the World Wide Web. It is an international industry consortium, jointly hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science [MIT/LCS] in the United States; the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique [INRIA] in Europe; and the Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus in Asia.

The W3 consortium formed in late 1994 with HTML as an important area of activity. By this time extensions to HTML were many and the language was becoming complex and unwieldy. More to the point, Netscape, Microsoft and other browser vendors were implementing different sub-sets of HTML features. The resulting incompatibility was something which the Consortium felt necessary to address, and in November 1995 the HTML ERB (Editorial Review Board) was formed to bring vendors around the same table to work collaboratively to prepare a common standard for HTML.

HTML evolves by dropping elements that have been found by experience to present difficulties or that can be better done by another means. The major reason for most HTML 4.0 deprecations is that presentation issues are being moved into style sheets, e.g. the BODY attributes.

Deprecated: A deprecated element or attribute is one that has been outdated by newer constructs, and which may become obsolete in future versions of HTML.

User agents should continue to support deprecated elements for reasons of backward compatibility.

Obsolete: An obsolete element or attribute is one for which there is no guarantee of support by a user agent.

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