there is tremendous ranting and raving in the Web world about how the HTML standard is fragmenting because of Netscape etc., and there is so much angst about trying to devise a *single* cohesive, unified standard that "everyone" follows. people talk as if Netscape is trying to "hijack" the standard, when in my opinion they are performing a valuable public service of trying to hammer the bits into useful form. everything they have proposed could not be handled by the earlier standards-- and if it could have been, chances are they would have used that standard.
Sure, the Netscape extensions are nice. And it's nice to have an operating system (M$-DOG) pre-installed on every hard drive. But Net$cape, like M$, was trying to esablish a dominant "follow-us-or-die" position in the industry. Yes, the Net$cape extensions allow people to do stuff that they wouldn't otherwise be able to do. But, the extensions *could have* been implemented in such a way that using them wouldn't be detrimental to non-Net$cape browsers. Instead, they've altered the World Wide Web in such a way that it can only be viewed "correctly" with Net$cape. The rest of your post was quite interesting. I *do* think it would be good to have multiple, interchangeable formats like we do for graphics. What we really need to make that happen are DETAILED SPECIFICATIONS.