RFC 2854 (rfc2854) - Page 2 of 8

The 'text/html' Media Type

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