The 'text/html' Media Type
RFC 2854
Document | Type |
RFC - Informational
(June 2000; No errata)
Was draft-connolly-text-html (individual)
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Authors | Larry Masinter , Daniel Connolly | ||
Last updated | 2013-03-02 | ||
Stream | Legacy | ||
Formats | plain text html pdf htmlized bibtex | ||
Stream | Legacy state | (None) | |
Consensus Boilerplate | Unknown | ||
RFC Editor Note | (None) | ||
IESG | IESG state | RFC 2854 (Informational) | |
Telechat date | |||
Responsible AD | (None) | ||
Send notices to | (None) |
Network Working Group D. Connolly Request for Comments: 2854 World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Obsoletes: 2070, 1980, 1942, 1867, 1866 L. Masinter Category: Informational AT&T June 2000 The 'text/html' Media Type Status of this Memo This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Copyright Notice Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2000). All Rights Reserved. Abstract This document summarizes the history of HTML development, and defines the "text/html" MIME type by pointing to the relevant W3C recommendations; it is intended to obsolete the previous IETF documents defining HTML, including RFC 1866, RFC 1867, RFC 1980, RFC 1942 and RFC 2070, and to remove HTML from IETF Standards Track. This document was prepared at the request of the W3C HTML working group. Please send comments to www-html@w3.org, a public mailing list with archive at <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/>. 1. Introduction and background HTML has been in use in the World Wide Web information infrastructure since 1990, and specified in various informal documents. The text/html media type was first officially defined by the IETF HTML working group in 1995 in [HTML20]. Extensions to HTML were proposed in [HTML30], [UPLOAD], [TABLES], [CLIMAPS], and [I18N]. The IETF HTML working group closed Sep 1996, and work on defining HTML moved to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The proposed extensions were incorporated to some extent in [HTML32], and to a larger extent in [HTML40]. The definition of multipart/form-data from [UPLOAD] was described in [FORMDATA]. In addition, a reformulation of HTML 4.0 in XML 1.0[XHTML1] was developed. Connolly & Masinter Informational [Page 1] RFC 2854 The 'text/html' Media Type June 2000 [HTML32] notes "This specification defines HTML version 3.2. HTML 3.2 aims to capture recommended practice as of early '96 and as such to be used as a replacement for HTML 2.0 (RFC 1866)." Subsequent specifications for HTML describe the differences in each version. In addition to the development of standards, a wide variety of additional extensions, restrictions, and modifications to HTML were popularized by NCSA's Mosaic system and subsequently by the competitive implementations of Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer; these extensions are documented in numerous books and online guides. 2. Registration of MIME media type text/html MIME media type name: text MIME subtype name: html Required parameters: none Optional parameters: charset The optional parameter "charset" refers to the character encoding used to represent the HTML document as a sequence of bytes. Any registered IANA charset may be used, but UTF-8 is preferred. Although this parameter is optional, it is strongly recommended that it always be present. See Section 6 below for a discussion of charset default rules. Note that [HTML20] included an optional "level" parameter; in practice, this parameter was never used and has been removed from this specification. [HTML30] also suggested a "version" parameter; in practice, this parameter also was never used and has been removed from this specification. Encoding considerations: See Section 4 of this document. Security considerations: See Section 7 of this document. Interoperability considerations: HTML is designed to be interoperable across the widest possible range of platforms and devices of varying capabilities. However, there are contexts (platforms of limited display capability, for example) where not all of the capabilities of the full HTML definition are feasible. There is ongoing work to develop both a modularization of HTML and a set of profiling capabilities to identify and negotiate restricted (and extended) capabilities. Connolly & Masinter Informational [Page 2] RFC 2854 The 'text/html' Media Type June 2000 Due to the long and distributed development of HTML, current practice on the Internet includes a wide variety of HTML variants. Implementors of text/html interpreters must be prepared to be "bug-compatible" with popular browsers in order to work with many HTML documents available the Internet. Typically, different versions are distinguishable by the DOCTYPE declaration contained within them, although the DOCTYPEShow full document text