Re: proposal for a new html tag

Christian Mogensen (mogens@CS.Stanford.EDU)
Thu, 23 Mar 95 06:23:40 EST

David - Morris (dwm@shell.portal.com) wrote:
: On Wed, 22 Mar 1995, Liam Relihan wrote:
: > If we are only interested in folding as a means to allow readers to skim
: > through text and selectively reveal interesting bits, then this just
: > requires a new tag in HTML and browsers that will fold/unfold text in
: > response to this tag.
[...]
: I think folding provides a nice intersection between two objectives ...
: that of helping the user cope with information AND by helping the user
: implicitly request less information up front reduce/manage network
: traffic. Serving the user and network with the same feature!

Well, you should still send the entire document over, so network
traffic is still the same. The browser would store the entire
document but render it selectively. The lag time would frustrate the
users otherwise - almost a second to open up a level of a hierarchy.

Say - could this be implemented as a browser feature using the
CLASS or ROLE attribute on a <DIV> tag? Same thing on a <UL> or <OL>
or <DL> of course, and the there are the <Hn>s - ok generalize it:
any (container?) tag could potentially be an outline element.

This could also be controlled through stylesheets... I think folding/
unfolding outline levels is a browser rendering feature, not something
that requires net tags. It needs a well defined ROLE or CLASS or
something, but that should suffice.

Christian "webhead <*>"