Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference

Chapter 8. HTML Reference

Since the earliest days of the World Wide Web, the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) standard has been pulled, pushed, twisted, extended, contracted, misunderstood, and even partially ignored by web browser vendors. With the formal release of the recommendation for HTML Version 4.0 at the end of 1997, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) outpaced the implementations of HTML in browsers that were shipping at the time. For once, the W3C recommendation was ahead of the implementation curve. This, of course, can lead to plenty of confusion for web application authors who study the details of the W3C documents in search of handy new features: it can be discouraging to see the tag or attribute of your dreams, only to discover that no browser on the planet supports it.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a complete list of HTML tags and attributes—the ones implemented in Navigator and Internet Explorer, as well as the ones specified in the W3C recommendation. So that you can see whether a particular entry applies to the browser(s) you must support, version information accompanies each tag and attribute listed in the following pages. At a glance, you can see the version number of Navigator, Internet Explorer, and the W3C HTML specification in which the item was first introduced. Because this book deals with Dynamic HTML, the history timeline goes back only to HTML 3.2, Navigator 2, and Internet Explorer 3. If an item existed prior to one of these versions, ...