Re: HTML 3 Internet Draft

Evan Kirshenbaum (evan@hplerk.hpl.hp.com)
Thu, 30 Mar 95 18:58:18 EST

The DTD (3/24) seems to be a little out of date with respect to the
draft:

o The draft says that TR, TH, and TD can take ALIGN=decimal, but the
DTD says that they take %horiz.align, which doesn't include
decimal. I would suggest that it be added.

o The draft says that COLSPEC can take "D", but the DTD does not
mention it.

o The DTD says that LANG defaults to "en.us". Since the draft now
says that the country portion is optional, I would suggest that
this be changed to simply "en".

I'm still a little uneasy with the treatment of TAB.

o First off, I think that we really need a CLASS attribute on this
so that people can use style sheets to specify things like leaders
and behavior when the point is past the tab (do you insert a space
or go to the next line).

o The draft could use a spec which actually used a set, non-left tab
stop. I'm pretty sure that as now described, the ALIGN attribute
belongs on the <TAB TO> rather than the <TAB ID>, but an example
would make this clear.

o The draft needs to specify what it means to "move to the
previously defined tab stop". In particular, is the targe a
specific distance from the right edge of the browser or the
prevailing right margin. This will have an impact on the number
of stops which will be generated by people formatting code in
HTML. (Either way is fine, but I'd like to see it specified.)

o I'm even more confused than I was before about what INDENT is
supposed to do. Again, an example is probably in order. Is

<tab indent=3 id=here>First line<br>
<tab to=here>Second line

supposed to produce

First line
Second line

or

First line
Second line

I had expected the second with the old wording, but the example
given (which uses INDENT without ID or TO) implies the first. The
problem with the description is that in poetry (the example
given), it is generally the second line of a long line that is
indented. (See the LaTeX "verse" environment.)

Also, the first form seems to rule out using a negative INDENT
value, which would be meaningful for setting code.

Since the first form can be achieved by

<tab indent=3><tab id=here>First line,

I would suggest that the semantics be specified as that of the
second:

<tab indent=3> Move over 3en
<tab id=here indent=3> Set a tab 3en from here without
moving

Alternatively, you could leave INDENT as always implying motion
and add OFFSET as specifying the relative position of the stop.