[6774] in www-talk@info.cern.ch

home help back first fref pref prev next nref lref last post

Re: Control areas ?

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Chris Lilley, Computer Graphics Un)
Tue Nov 22 16:01:28 1994

Date: Tue, 22 Nov 1994 21:43:52 +0100
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: lilley@v5.cgu.mcc.ac.uk
From: lilley@v5.cgu.mcc.ac.uk (Chris Lilley, Computer Graphics Unit)
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>

Sean Martin wrote, about non-scrolling header and footer elements as a propsed 
HTML addition:

> Seems to me that this might be a good idea. 

Could well be. Although is this a navigation area, rather than footers as in for 
footnotes, or for footing text as in printed documents?

> It would need an HTML 
> extention but I doubt that this would be consistent with SGML. 

Why not? Any particular reason, or a vague feeling?

> Perhaps it could go into the &lt;header&gt; area ?

The head area is not intended for this sort of information. Your proposed top 
and bottom tags would contain information to be displayed in the document, so on 
that basis they should go in the body element

On the other hand, the suggestion seemed to be that the document window be split 
into three, with the central part scrolling. Given that the top and bottom 
areas, which might be multiple lines or contain various sized images, would be 
of different sizes - or not present at all - this would require a new scrolling 
display widget for each document which could prove expensive on some systems.

Browsers that parse the HTML as it streams in, and display it before the stream 
has finished, would need to know about the top and bottom elements early on. 
Perhaps, in HTML 3, which I believe can contain multiple body parts .... yup he 
said, checking, the top and bottom parts could have their own body parts 
restricted to come before the others.

Eg

<doctype stuff><html>
<head> etc</head>
<body role=top> top stuff>
<body role=bottom> bottom stuff>
<body> body material</body>
<body> another bunch of body material</body>
</html>

Better yet, the sketch DTD says "Note that multiple body sections are permitted 
and that you can specify whether a section floats or is glued to one of the 
window sides"

Depending on whether you describe a rectangolar window as having two or four 
sides ;-) this might provide exactly what is being asked for, without any 
extensions.

--
Chris

home help back first fref pref prev next nref lref last post