Is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) the most powerless standards body on the planet? That's up to others to decide, but the widely ignored committee announced its endorsement of HTML 3.2 this week. To put this in perspective, Microsoft has supported HTML 3.2 with Internet Explorer 3.0 since August, 1995, and supported most of the standard in January of last year with 2.0. Netscape, ever the straggler in the standards department, has yet to fully support any HTML standard to date, though they do support most HTML 3.2 features in their current Navigator product. Since Netscape has an overwhelming marketshare advantage, it is typically Netscape, not the W3C, that sets (de-facto) HTML standards. HTML 3.2 features include such things as frames, tables, applets, superscripts and subscripts, and other features Web designers have been using for a long, long time. The committee is now considering features for HTML 4.0, with cascading style sheets, object specifications, and object layout and layering control on the list of suggestions. Since the two most popular browsers are implementing most these features already, it should only take the W3C another year and a half to give us their OK. Like you, I await their decision eagerly. :) Really
