RFC 2854 (rfc2854) - Page 1 of 8

The 'text/html' Media Type

Alternative Format: Original Text Document
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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
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