"never intended to be archival" – HTML originated as an easy to handle stand-alone documentation standard (as a cut-down version of SGMLguid + links/anchors). T

"never intended to be archival" – HTML originated as an easy to handle stand-alone documentation standard (as a cut-down version of SGMLguid + links/anchors). The entire point of a documentation standard is backwards compatibility. Especially the just-ignore-what-is-not-implemented policy made this very promising regarding future usage, as long as major structural elements were to be honored. (Compare the drop of framesets, menus and manueitems as primary elements to represent structure and hierarchy, or the drop of major phrase elements conveying meaning and emphasis. Also, referring to the recommendation for substitutes, HTML is now not a stand-alone language anymore, but requires additional CSS.) Opposed to this, HTML was not intended as presentation layer for fancy web-apps. (There had been better around for this in the Hypertext-world, even then.)