Microsoft Corp has devised a significant set of object extensions to HyperText Mark-up Language which it has submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium. The company also spent two days showing the proposed ‘HyperText Mark-up Language object model specification’ to around 75 unnamed software vendors. The announcement triggered an indignant response from Netscape Communications Corp, which said it had submitted its own object-oriented proposals a while ago. Netscape claimed that to publicize submissions ahead of a World Wide Web Consortium decision breached the organization’s rules. But the World Wide Web Consortium said that pending a reorganization of its procedures, there were no hard and fast rules on the matter. If the World Wide Web Consortium does ratify the approach, it will put Netscape’s own browser development on the back foot giving Microsoft a boost in the frantic browser race. The Microsoft proposals would expose the Mark-up Language page to the browser as a set of programmable objects. It would be possible, for example to set up events so that a table would change color when the mouse passed over it. Similarly, document content could be manipulated without the page having to be reloaded. Java and ActiveX elements can already manage this, but Microsoft argues that a lighter-weight option is also needed. Jon Roskill, Microsoft group product manager in the Internet system and tools division said he believed the proposal is not very controversial and that his best guess is that the World Wide Web Consortium’s HyperText Mark-up Language Editorial Review Board would pass it in a few months. He added that the only alternative proposal for Object orientation he was aware of was Netscape’s, which he described as a very much more scaled-down proposal concerning style sheets. Jean-Francois Abramatic, the Web Consortium’s newly-appointed chairman declined to comment on either time-scales or how many proposals were before the review board. Though radical in nature, Roskill says that Microsoft’s proposals would leave the guts of a Mark-up Language page untouched. Object-enabled pages would contain a recognizable conventional Mark-up Language section, and a second section describing the page in object terms. The proposal is language-neutral, says Roskill which means that script can be written in any language that the browser can interpret; Java-Script or VBScript look likely choices. Despite the fact that Microsoft has placed the proposal before the 75 independent software vendors, the company isn’t publishing a white paper or the proposal itself until after the World Wide Web Consortium has deliberated.
