Re: Generalizing Banners

Lou Montulli writes:

 |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.

[Examples of screen design omitted]

 |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?

Short answer: no (syntactical) change is needed.

There are three different issues here:

 1. relations among documents, such as main document and navigator
 2. layout of the viewer for a single document
 3. layout of elements within a document

ad 1: There are roughly two categories of relations: associated
documents that have no independent meaning (navigators, toolbars,
style sheets, possibly annotations) and hyperlinked documents
(<A>). Where to put navigators, toolbars, etc. is up to the User
Agent. HTML already has ways of referring to them, via the LINK
tag. (Although I think that navigators and style sheets are better
handled with Panorama's PI's or entityrc file, and that LINK should be
used only to add buttons to the toolbar.)

The result of traversing a hyperlink (<A>) can be that the document is
displayed in the old window, a new window (discouraged) or a pane of
the old window (see 2 below), depending on the value of REL and/or
CLASS.

ad 2: A document's style sheet should probably be able to define a
page model. There will most likely be a proposal about this in the
next style sheet draft. For on-line presentation this could be a
matrix of NxM panes, a stack of N panes, or (horror!) a Microsoft
MDI-like window. For display on paper, this could be single or double
sided page with running headers and footers.

The navigator and toolbar would still be outside the viewer, as
explained above.

ad 3: A related, but independent lay-out option is to display HTML
elements with fixed height, such that, e.g., a UL becomes a box
with a scrollbar. This is in the upcoming style sheet draft.

Btw. I'm not sure what a `banner' is. It seems a rather meaningless
term, more suggestive of layout than of structure. Maybe it's better
to have a generalized IMG, for inclusion of arbitrary documents, which
will then be displayed in different panes under the direction of the
style sheet and, if needed, the CLASS attribute.



Bert
-- 
                          Bert Bos                      Alfa-informatica
                 <bert@let.rug.nl>           Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
    <http://www.let.rug.nl/~bert/>     Postbus 716, NL-9700 AS GRONINGEN

Follow-ups

• Terry Allen (terry@ora.com)