I'd like to throw in the comment (not especially re Ian) that I would like
us to have some consistenancy in meaning of attributes between tags. I'm
concerned that some ideas have suggested overloading existing attributes in
various ways.
(I've put off commenting on this because I'm not clear how far this
discussion is going.)
METHOD and ACTION have some specific meaning in <FORM>. ACTION is a URI,
and for http: URLs, METHOD must be an HTTP method. It looks like the HTTP
1.0 draft defines the METHODs:
GET,HEAD,PUT,POST,DELETE,LINK,UNLINK
(http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Protocols/HTTP/Methods.html defines others).
In any case, specifications of browser behavior are not always the same
thing as HTTP methods.
(A recent HTML 2.0 draft says:
"The METHODS attributes of anchors and links provide information about the
functions that the user
may perform on an object. These are more accurately given by the HTTP
protocol when it is used, but it
may, for similar reasons as for the TITLE attribute, be useful to include
the information in advance in the
link. For example, the HTML interpreter may chose a different rendering as
a function of the methods
allowed; for example, something that is searchable may get a different icon.
The value of the METHODS attribute is a whitespace-separated list of HTTP
methods supported by the
object for public use.")
Stylesheets are a good place for information about presentation, and
optional browser behavior.
I would hope that their use would be totally optional: there would be
nothing in a stylesheet, which ignored if, would totally break a document's
structure.
If we want to do something with proposals that will specify totally new
browser behavior when clicking on a <A ...> link, I think we need to put
new markup in some version of the DTD. (Not likely for HTML 2.0)
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Albert Lunde Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu