Re: HTML Scalability

Peter Flynn (pflynn@curia.ucc.ie)
Mon, 23 Jan 95 18:24:15 EST

Define a single recursive <DIV> element instead of multiple <DIVn>s --

<!element div - - (%body.content;)>

Provided it has attributes to let you specify the logical level, eg
<div level="chapter"> or <div level="subsubsection">

possible. Ranked section elements can make maintenance difficult --
changing a deeply nested <DIV1> to a <DIV2> and updating all its
descendants can be painful.

It's always baffled me why SGML editors don't have a "cascade marked
region all {input} elements up|down one level" function. Any authors
out there care to implement this? Should also work when you want to
cut and paste a whole <div> into an existing <div> of a different
level: it should warn you and give you a chance to abort, but allow
the paste, relevelling the relevant <div>s...

since HTML should be flexible enough to represent any document
structure. (Maybe adding SUBSECS to %body.content; would work?)

Use TEI?

<SECT>s must begin with a heading, but <DIV>s are unrestricted.
If the "level" of a section is a useful thing to know, it could
be determined by the level of the first heading element.

That's actually quite a neat way to do it. I think we would have a
fair bit of explaining to do if we move away from h1|h2|h3 etc too
fast though.

///Peter