Generalizing Banners
| From: |
Lou Montulli <montulli@mozilla.com> |
| Date: |
Sun, 20 Aug 95 03:31:37 EDT |
Currently in the HTML 3 draft is a great new tag called BANNER
that allows the document author to embed another HTML document within the
current document. This embedded document could act independently of the
current document.
This allows for some interresting new documents. For instance
you might have a document that looks like this:
|---------------|
| Doc 1 |
|---------------|
| Doc 2 |
| |
| |
|---------------|
If you use multiple banners you could have documents like this:
|---------------|
| Doc 1 |
|---------------|
| Doc 3 |
| |
|---------------|
| Doc 4 |
|---------------|
| Doc 5 |
| |
|---------------|
Combined with forms and the interactive nature of the Web this can be a very
expressive user interface. Espescially if the banners can load
independently of each other and can effect the contents of the others.
But I think that BANNERs need to be generalized beyond the simple
concept for which they are named. It is more desireable to
divide the window up into arbitrary configurations rather than
just horizontally.
Consider a window like this:
|------|------------|
| | |
| | |
| Doc1 | Doc2 |
| | |
| | |
|------|------------|
Or
|------|------------|
| Doc 1 |
|------|------------|
| Doc2 | Doc3 |
| | |
| | |
|------|------------|
With this expressive power it would be possible to emulate almost
any existing user interface. Using form elements links and
images (server or client side) and a method for having one cell
effect changes in other cells you could design new UI's
that are specifically suited to the web application your are
trying to develop.
My question to this group is what would be the best
syntactical way to add this expressive power to HTML?
:lou
--
Lou Montulli http://www.mcom.com/people/montulli/
Netscape Communications Corp.
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