RFC 2854 (rfc2854) - Page 1 of 8
The 'text/html' Media Type
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
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 , a public mailing list
with archive at .
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