Re: HTML+ : questions, and a suggestion for a graph or tree

"Timo Harmo - SocSci U of Helsinki" <HARMO@valt.helsinki.fi>
Message-id: <MAILQUEUE-101.930930091932.800@valt.Helsinki.FI>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
From: "Timo Harmo - SocSci U of Helsinki"  <HARMO@valt.helsinki.fi>
Date:         30 Sep 93 09:19:32 EET DST
Subject:      Re: HTML+ : questions, and a suggestion for a graph or tree
Priority: normal
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> And finally, a suggestion for a new tag, a list type which is
> graphically displayed as a tree.  This could either be an extension of
> the list, or a whole new tag (<tree></tree>)

..

> It might also be nice to display two trees or graphs side by side, and

Yes, GRAPHS. Why limit to trees now that hypertext is freeing us from
hierarchical structures :-)

I would do it somehing like this

<graphlist xmin=0 xmax=1000, ymin=0, ymax=1000>
<item x=100,y=200> bar </item>
<item x=700,y=300> foo </item>
<link from=foo,to=bar>
</graphlist>

Now a clever client would convert the coordinates to
whatever coordinates it internally uses to plot the
items and the link, a less clever one would just display
the items as a list (maybe with leading spaces added)
  foo

               bar

There was some talk about this a long time ago. Then
the question of who (server, client, author) should
construct these graphs was brought up.
I  think it is the authors job. Of course it would be nice if they
could be constructed by the server or the client on the fly, but I
think it is asking too much.
Some network-analysis programs can be used to perform
multidimensional scaling, clustering etc. to help the
author in map-making, but I think it is mainly handcraft
(and quite demanding craft also, I fear).
 -Timo