Extending HTML in a principled way with displets

Abstract

Displets provide authors and programmers with a way to freely extend the HTML language on a per-document basis in a principled manner. Currently, in order to be accepted, HTML elements must be approved by the official HTML review board. Non-standard extensions have appeared, and have relied on the commercial power of the proponents for acceptance. Two major forces are driving the extension process of the HTML language: those who favor a better description of document elements, as with SGML, and those who would like better control over the final appearance of documents, as with Postscript and other display-oriented languages. Special notations (such as mathematics, music, etc.), are hardly considered—if at all—in defining the HTML standard. We designed displets to fill this frustrating gap. Displets are Java classes that are activated while rendering an HTML document. Displets provide graphical artists a better control over the final appearance of HTML documents, librarians and indexers a better description of their content, and those in need of new notations a way to describe and use graphical objects in a manner compatible with the graphical and structural habits of the HTML community.