Page Breaks and Tables of Contents in HTML

"Peter Lister, Cranfield Computer Centre" <ccprl@xdm001.ccc.cranfield.ac.uk>
Message-id: <9305170955.AA12072@xdm039>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Cc: ccprl@xdm001.ccc.cranfield.ac.uk
Subject: Page Breaks and Tables of Contents in HTML
Reply-To: p.lister@cranfield.ac.uk
Date: Mon, 17 May 93 10:54:59 BST
From: "Peter Lister, Cranfield Computer Centre" <ccprl@xdm001.ccc.cranfield.ac.uk>

I would like a page break in HTML, e.g. <page> would tell a viewer to
display text following this point as if it came from another HTML
document (though it is NOT desirable that any other functions would be
limited in this way, e.g. searches). There would be a method (probably
an anchor automtically generated by the viewer) for moving on to the
next page, or back to the beginning.

To go along with this, a table of contents would be nice (i.e. an
automatically generated table of intra-document reference anchors), so
that users can warp straight to the relevant text from the beginning of
the document without having to search through a large file (whether via
a search function or by eye).

All of this functionality happens now, it's just that books have to be
divided into separate files for each chapter manually, and have a hand
crafted TOC. All I ask is that the hooks be put in place for this to be
done by the viewer. Since most systems do generate mulit-page documents
in a single file, HTML translators are made a bit more awkward if the
translator has to open a new file (and insert anchors) or kludge (like
I do) by inserting a line of dashes.

Again, XMosaic already has much of the functionality there, as the
Motif text widget forces page breaks. Maybe OSF's design constraint
wouldn't look so bad if we could structure HTML more like a real book.
I find a document so big that it forces an XMosaic page break is *very* unfriendly.

Peter Lister                                    p.lister@cranfield.ac.uk
Computer Centre,
Cranfield Institute of Technology,        Voice: +44 234 754200 ext 2828
Cranfield, Bedfordshire MK43 0AL England    Fax: +44 234 750875