HyperText Markup Language (HTML) 2.0

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HyperText Markup Language (HTML) 2.0

Table of Contents

Identification and description
Local use
Sustainability factors
Quality and functionality factors
File type signifiers
Notes
Format specifications
Useful references

Format Description Properties

ID: fdd000477
Short name: HTML_2_0
Content categories: text
Format Category: file-format, encoding
Other facets: unitary, text, structured, symbolic
Last significant FDD update: 2018-03-13
Draft status: Full

Identification and description

Relationship to other formats
Full name	HyperText Markup Language (HTML) 2.0
Description	Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for creating web pages and web applications. This format description is for the first formally standardized specification for HTML, published as RFC 1866: Hypertext Markup Language - 2.0 in November 1995 by the HTML Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). HTML 2.0 introduced the general structure that has been retained in later versions of HTML. An overarching <HTML> element contains a <HEAD> element and a <BODY> element, defining the two main components of an HTML document. The <BODY> component contains the visible content of document. The <HEAD> component contains the mandatory <TITLE> element and optional elements for document metadata, links to related external resources, and support for server functions. The new <META> element was introduced as an extensible container for individual metadata elements, expressed as name/value pairs. Another new feature standardized in HTML 2.0 was support for forms that allow users to enter and submit data, triggering an action, such as a search. The specification included several document type definitions (DTDs). The main DTD (Level 2) covered all HTML features described in the specification, including deprecated features. A Strict DTD provided a more structurally rigid definition in order to support strict SGML validation. A Level 1 DTD excluded use of the new form feature. A Strict Level 1 DTD could be used to support strict validation but excluded the use of forms. The compilers of this resource have not determined whether DTDs other than the main, most permissive DTD were used in practice. Comments welcome. For a discussion of the potential use of different DTDs and DOCTYPE declarations for HTML dialects, see HTML Dialects. The next officially adopted specification for HTML (HTML 3.2) did not define different DTDs in this way. Over the next fifteen months, several extensions to HTML 2.0 were proposed and published as IETF RFCs. See Status pages for HTML Working Group from the IETF. RFC 1867 (November 1995) proposed an extension to the form feature to support uploading of files. This extension was incorporated into HTML 3.2 (January 1997). RFC 1942 (May 1996) defined markup for tables. A subset of the proposed table markup was incorporated into HTML 3.2. RFC 1980 (August 1996) proposed an extension to support a client-side mechanism for image maps, which allow users to access different documents by clicking different areas in an image. This extension was incorporated into HTML 3.2 RFC 2070 (January 1997) addressed the issue of internationalization of HTML by extending the specification of HTML 2.0, primarily by removing the restriction to the ISO-8859-1 coded character set. The proposal was to extend the character set to be the Universal Character Set (UCS) of ISO 10646:1993 "as amended" (equivalent to Unicode). Several encodings were permitted. This proposal was not incorporated into HTML 3.2, but was incorporated into HTML 4.0 (December 1997). For more on character encodings in HTML, see HTML_4_01 and Useful References below.
Production phase	The primary use of HTML is as a final-state format for web pages made available on the Internet. Early HTML files were often created directly in a text editor. Some HTML 2.0 documents will have been created in early visual HTML editors. See Notes below.
Subtype of	HTML_family, HTML File Format Family
Has earlier version	HTML_early, HyperText Markup Language (HTML), versions prior to 2.0
Has later version	HTML_3_2, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) 3.2
Defined via	SGML, Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). ISO 8879:1986

Local use

LC experience or existing holdings	See HTML_family.
LC preference	See HTML_family.

Sustainability factors

Disclosure	HTML 2.0 is a non-proprietary format, openly documented specification and freely implementable.
Documentation	Version 2.0 of the HTML specification was published by the IETF as RFC 1866 in November 1995. Over the next fifteen months, several extensions were specified as IETF RFCs. See Format Specifications below.
Adoption	HTML 2.0 was widely used in the 1990s and occasional pages using this version of HTML are still to be found on the Web. Some features of HTML 2.0 are not supported in browsers current as of March 2018. These include the ISINDEX and NEXTID tags. Obsolete tags can be identified at CanIUse or in the latest HTML 5.x specification. See also HTML_family.
Licensing and patents	See HTML_family.
Transparency	All HTML files can be opened and viewed in text editors. Since HTML 2.0 files do not include style markup (e.g., in CSS) or scripts (e.g., Javascript), their contents are easily read and interpreted using a plain text editor. The earliest visual editors for HTML appeared in 1995 and will have been used during the period HTML 2.0 was current. See Notes below.
Self-documentation	HTML 2.0 introduced the <HEAD> section, which could include <META> elements to describe the HTML document using name/value pairs. See HTML_family.
External dependencies	None.
Technical protection considerations	See HTML_family.

Quality and functionality factors

Text
Normal rendering	The character encoding specified for HTML 2.0 corresponds to ISO Latin-1 character set, comprising 191 graphic characters, including the alphabets of most Western European languages. Characters that could not be entered on a keyboard could be incorporated by using SGML-style entities. For example, a lower-case e with acute accent could be typed as é or é (the equivalent code in ISO Latin-1 as a decimal number). For other textual characteristics of HTML documents, see HTML_family.
Integrity of document structure	HTML 2.0 included structural elements for paragraphs, headings, ordered and unordered lists. Also defined were "blockquote" blocks for wrapping a quotation from another source and two special types of list block, <MENU> and <DIR> (for directories).
Integrity of layout and display	Preserving particular aspects of layout was not an intent of the original HTML. The focus was on making the textual content and semantic structure of a resource conveniently readable on different devices.
Support for mathematics, formulae, etc.	The HTML 2.0 specification includes no support for representing mathematics.
Functionality beyond normal rendering	HTML was developed specifically to support linking among online resources. HTML 2.0 included support for forms that allowed users to enter data, for example, terms that could be used to query a database or user name and password to log in to a website.

File type signifiers and format identifiers

Tag	Value	Note
Filename extension	See related format.	See HTML_family
Internet Media Type	See related format.	See HTML_family
Magic numbers	<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0	The specification for HTML 2.0 requires that a conforming document start with a document type declaration that begins with '<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0'. Variants are specified for different profiles, but all begin with this string. Note that lower case characters may be used.
Pronom PUID	fmt/97	See http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/PRONOM/fmt/97.
Wikidata Title ID	Q2892563	See https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2892563

Notes

General	Editing HTML 2.0 documents: In the early days of HTML, pages were authored in text-based editors. Indeed, many were created on systems without a graphical display. WYSIWIG (What You See Is What You Get) or visual editors appeared in the mid 1990s. According to What's WYSIWYG? How Today's Online Editor Came to Be, the first WYSIWYG HTML editor, WebMagic, was launched by Silicon Graphics in 1995. FrontPage was released by Vermeer Technologies in late 1995 and acquired by Microsoft in 1996. DreamWeaver was released by Macromedia in 1997 and widely adopted for building and maintaining websites. See Wikipedia's list of HTML Editors. HTML Forms: HTML 2.0 standardized a method for users to enter data into an HTML document and for that data to be used to perform an action, such as logging in to the website or entering terms for a search query. A form is a template for a sequence of name/value pair fields with an associated action. A <FORM> element has a sequence of <INPUT> elements. Each <INPUT> element has a NAME attribute; the associated value is given an initial value using markup and can be edited by the user, subject to constraints specified in the markup. A special <INPUT> element is presented to the user as an option to submit the entered data. After submission by the user, the set of data is sent to the URL specified in the ACTION attribute of the <FORM>.
History	The first formal standard for the HTML format was version 2.0, and published as RFC 1866 in November 1995 by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force. During 1995, the popularity of the web and conflicting ideas for new features, including from the emerging browser vendors, overwhelmed the IETF working group. A version 3.0 for HTML had been prepared as an IETF Internet Draft, but expired in September 1995 without moving to the IETF Standards track. A November 1995 meeting resulted in the forming of a new group under the auspices of the World Wide Web consortium (W3C), founded in 1994. The new group consisted largely of representatives from browser vendors. The IETF HTML Working group disbanded in December 1995 and the W3C became the home for HTML standardization. The next version of HTML that reached a stage of approval was HTML 3.2, issued as a W3C Recommendation by in January 1997.

General

Editing HTML 2.0 documents: In the early days of HTML, pages were authored in text-based editors. Indeed, many were created on systems without a graphical display. WYSIWIG (What You See Is What You Get) or visual editors appeared in the mid 1990s. According to What's WYSIWYG? How Today's Online Editor Came to Be, the first WYSIWYG HTML editor, WebMagic, was launched by Silicon Graphics in 1995. FrontPage was released by Vermeer Technologies in late 1995 and acquired by Microsoft in 1996. DreamWeaver was released by Macromedia in 1997 and widely adopted for building and maintaining websites. See Wikipedia's list of HTML Editors.

HTML Forms: HTML 2.0 standardized a method for users to enter data into an HTML document and for that data to be used to perform an action, such as logging in to the website or entering terms for a search query. A form is a template for a sequence of name/value pair fields with an associated action. A <FORM> element has a sequence of <INPUT> elements. Each <INPUT> element has a NAME attribute; the associated value is given an initial value using markup and can be edited by the user, subject to constraints specified in the markup. A special <INPUT> element is presented to the user as an option to submit the entered data. After submission by the user, the set of data is sent to the URL specified in the ACTION attribute of the <FORM>.

History

The first formal standard for the HTML format was version 2.0, and published as RFC 1866 in November 1995 by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force. During 1995, the popularity of the web and conflicting ideas for new features, including from the emerging browser vendors, overwhelmed the IETF working group. A version 3.0 for HTML had been prepared as an IETF Internet Draft, but expired in September 1995 without moving to the IETF Standards track. A November 1995 meeting resulted in the forming of a new group under the auspices of the World Wide Web consortium (W3C), founded in 1994. The new group consisted largely of representatives from browser vendors. The IETF HTML Working group disbanded in December 1995 and the W3C became the home for HTML standardization. The next version of HTML that reached a stage of approval was HTML 3.2, issued as a W3C Recommendation by in January 1997.

Format specifications

IETF RFC 1866 | Hypertext Markup Language - 2.0. November 1995 (multiformat view) (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1866). Also at https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1866.txt
Below are links to plain text views of the original HTML 2.0 specification and RFCs for various proposed extensions.
- IETF RFC 1866 | Hypertext Markup Language - 2.0. November 1995 (https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1866.txt).
- IETF RFC 1867 | Form-based File Upload in HTML. November 1995. (https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1867.txt).
- IETF RFC 1942 | HTML Tables. May 1996 (https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1942.txt).
- IETF RFC 1980 | A Proposed Extension to HTML : Client-Side Image Maps. August 1996. (https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1980.txt).
- IETF RFC 2070 | Internationalization of the Hypertext Markup Language. January 1997. (https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2070.txt).

Useful references

URLs

Wikipedia entry for HTML (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML).
W3C | HTML 2.0 Materials (https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/). A collection of resources relating to HTML 2.0 and its development.
HTML+ (Hypertext markup format). Dave Raggett. November 1993 (https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/HTMLPlus/htmlplus_1.html). A discussion paper on HTML and proposals for developments.
The character encodings for ISO 10646 (equivalent to Unicode) mentioned in the proposal published as RFC 2070: Internationalization of the Hypertext Markup Language were UCS-2, UCS-4, UTF-7, and UTF-8. UTF stands for UCS Transformation Format. Below are some resources related to these different encodings. The proposal was not incorporated into the next version of HTML, HTML 3.2, published in January 1997, but was incorporated, with minor modifications, into HTML 4.0, published in December 1997. During this period, there was active debate among browser developers and operating system developers as to how best to move towards full support for Unicode. With the emergence of XML as a W3C Recommendation in October 2000 and XHTML_1_0, the encoding used primarily for interoperability became UTF-8, with some use of UTF-16. All XML processors are required to accept the UTF-8 and UTF-16 encodings of ISO 10646.
- UCS-2 and its relationship to Unicode | from IBM Knowledge Center (https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/ssw_i5_54/nls/rbagsucs2.htm). UCS-2 is a 2-byte (aka 2-octet) encoding. This piece also discusses UCS-4, a 4-octet encoding.
- UCS-2 and UTF-8 | from IBM Knowledge Center (https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/ssw_aix_71/com.ibm.aix.nlsgdrf/ucs-2_utf-8.htm). Relates the UCS-2 encoding to other encodings, including UCS-4 and UTF-8.
- RFC 1642 | UTF-7: A Mail-safe Transformation Format of Unicode (1994) (https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1642.txt).
- UTF-8 | ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 AMENDMENT 2 (1996). UCS Transformation Format 8 (https://www.iso.org/standard/26223.html).
Internet Draft for HTML 3.0, published as draft-ietf-html-specv3-00.txt in April 1995. (https://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/html3/CoverPage.html). This Internet Draft did not progress to the IETF RFC stage. However, many of the features described influenced subsequent versions of HTML.
W3C Recommendation | HTML 3.2 Reference Specification. 14-Jan-1997 (https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html32).
W3C Recommendation | HTML 4.0 Specification. 18-Dec-1997 (https://web.archive.org/web/20111205115900/http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40-971218/html40.pdf). As PDF, via Internet Archive. In contrast to its usual practices, W3C no longer provides access to this file or the full contents of other versions of the HTML 4.0 specification. Attempts to access these files are deflected to the HTML 4.01 Specification.
PRONOM provides records for chronological versions of the HTML format that have distinguishing signatures (via a DOCTYPE declaration) and a record for generic HTML (recognizable only by the existence of opening and closing <HTML> or <BODY> tags, including tags in lower case).
- PRONOM entry for fmt/97 (http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/PRONOM/fmt/97). HTML 2.0. PUID: fmt/97. With DOCTYPE declaration for 2.0
- PRONOM entry for fmt/96 (http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/PRONOM/fmt/96). HTML (generic). PUID: fmt/96
Wikidata entry for Q2892563 (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2892563). Information in Wikidata about HTML 2.0. Wikidata Title ID: Q2892563.
See also HTML_family.

Last Updated: 03/29/2018

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