Re: ACTION re: HTML 3: Too many tags!

Ian Graham (igraham@hprc.utoronto.ca)
Wed, 26 Jul 95 16:32:20 EDT

>
> On Wed, 26 Jul 1995, Ian Graham wrote:
> > As for the semantic elements:
> >
> > INS and DEL have important meanings in a legal and other contexts. One can
> > easily imagine a legal browser that could toggle between inserted and deleted
> > text to give a view a quick view of revisions. If they have such a well
> > understood meaning to a large community, why bury them as an attribe value
> > to some grab-bag element?
>
> In my opinion, annotations should be external to the document, not inside
> it. Annotations need a lot more flexibility than a few tags could
> provide - who is doing the INSerting and DELeting? Why? What about more
> than one annotation, where the second relies upon the first?

I don't mean to preclude this option, and agree that INS and DEL do not
solve the issue of annotations. But, In a working draft of a legal
document you are often presented with a single document containing
a set of marked insertions and deletions (or, so I am told!), and I
see INS and DEL as representing this simple mechanism. Perhaps
this is insufficient, but it represents at least one type of current
practice.

I've thought a bit about how to do something more complicated, like context
diffs, proper revision control, etc. but have not thought about how
to create the HTML side of this -- this seemed largely a web database
problem, with just some hooks to HTML to indicate where the
insertion/deletion came from. Maybe <INS CLASS=version1.1.2> would do?
-- I don't know.

> Leave annotations to be a separate document, like a "context diff", which
> is applied to a document rather than rendered with it. Just my thought,
> if we're looking for places to apply occam's razor.
>
> Brian
>
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