Re: Generalizing Banners (page layout)

>Lou Montulli writes:  <3036E492.2781@mozilla.com>

>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:

[portions deleted -- table-like page layout examples]

>My question to this group is what would be the best
>syntactical way to add this expressive power to HTML?

The desired extensions can be described as:
(1) documents with multiple "stories" (as in a newspaper)
(2) more sophisiticated layout algorithms than most browsers currently
support (for example, multiple layout areas on the page)

And I infer that Lou would like the ability to have the document's creator,
as well as possibly the reader, estsablish the page layout and story
composition.

My suggestion would be to use stylesheets.  It preserves the content of the
document(s) in html (without changing html) while enabling very powerful,
but independent, layout of the document.  Most of the features requested
are handled in the page and column specification of the stylesheet. Here,
"page" and "column" are interpreted slightly differently than in the case
of paper-based documents, but I think you get the idea.

Jim Hamerly
Digital Style Corporation

<jham@paseo.com>
<jham@electriciti.com>
619.486.3797