Keep in mind the distributed computing issues: caching, round trip times...
Integrating a full-fledged SGML entity manager with the web I/R protocols
might be a good idea, but I have thought about it a lot and so far
failed to come up with a strategy that I'm happy with.
The <a> element was conceived to cover all these cases.
(The only thing I'd change is to allow a <as id=x1>...<ae id=x1> pair
as an alternative to <a>...</a> for cases where anchors overlap
elements...)
This <include> stuff reminds me of the original <img> thread:
http://gummo.stanford.edu/html/hypermail/.www-talk-1993q1.messages/178.html
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 93 14:04:55 +0100
From: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@www3.cern.ch>
Message-id: <9302261304.AA05957@www3.cern.ch>
To: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Subject: Re: proposed new tag: IMG
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Reply-To: timbl@nxoc01.cern.ch
I had imagined that figues would be reprented as
<a name=fig1 href="fghjkdfghj" REL="EMBED, PRESENT">Figure </a>
where the relation ship values mean
EMBED Embed this here when presenting it
PRESENT Present this whenever the source document
is presented
Note that you can have various combinations of these, and if
the browser doesn't support either one, it doesn't break.
A see that using this as a method for selectable icons means nesting
anchors. Hmmm. But I hadn't wanted a special tag.
Annother way would be to declare an entity with SYSTEM attribute
giving the URL and then invoke that entity, but that would mean an
extendable entity dictionary which is not currently needed.