Hmm... I find dynamically changing the scrolling mechanism
really annoying. X Mosaic and Lynx both do this with FORMS;
With Mosaic, pressing the down arrow key scrolls the document
view up until a <TEXTAREA> slides underneath the mouse pointer,
then all of a sudden it starts moving the text insertion
cursor instead. Lynx's navigation keys also get messed up
when you traverse to an input field. This drives me nuts.
A spreadsheet-like scrolling display with fixed headers & footers
would be useful for large tables though; I just don't think
it should be displayed inline with the main document.
How does this sound: By default, browsers should try to
display tables inside the main document just like Arena and
X Mosaic do now. If that's not possible -- the table's
too wide or tall, or the user or stylesheet requests it --
then the browser should just display the caption as a
hyperlink. Selecting the caption/link would bring up a separate
display (a pop-up window, or switch to a different screen)
which gives a spreadsheet-like view of the table,
with fixed headers, footers, and what have you.
It would be nice if browsers could do something similar
with <FORMS> but (here I go again) those are so badly
broken it's hard to do anything sensible with them.
They don't have a <CAPTION> or <TITLE> to display as
the link text, and they pretty much have to be formatted
as flowed text because the content model doesn't provide any
other structure. Oh well. There's always gopher+ ASK blocks.
(This probably doesn't belong on html-wg... sorry.)
--Joe English
joe@trystero.art.com