Re: The Great Document Menu Debate

Tony Sanders <sanders@bsdi.com>
Errors-To: sanders@bsdi.com
Errors-To: sanders@bsdi.com
Message-id: <9308101801.AA05342@austin.BSDI.COM>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: The Great Document Menu Debate 
In-Reply-To: David C. Martin's message of Tue, 10 Aug 93 08:54:07 PDT.
Errors-To: sanders@bsdi.com
Reply-To: sanders@bsdi.com
Organization: Berkeley Software Design, Inc.
Date: Tue, 10 Aug 1993 13:01:44 -0500
From: Tony Sanders <sanders@bsdi.com>
Status: RO

> Well, everyone wants something different.
> 
> What we want to be able to do is have information in the HTML header
> that indicates the structural aspects of an HTML document relative to
> some larger whole, e.g. pages w/in an article, w/in an issue, w/in a
> volume w/in a journal.

What you want are <LINK>'s which are defined in HTML but no one implements
them so I guess no one really wants to use them very badly :-)

See Also
    <http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/Elements/LINK.html>

    <BLOCKQUOTE>
    Typical uses are to indicate authorship, related indexes and glossaries,
    older or more recent versions, etc.  Links can indicate a static tree
    structure in which the document was authored by pointing to a "parent"
    and "next" and "previous" document, for example.
    </BLOCKQUOTE>

    <http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/Relationships.html>

    The defined relationship values are:
	UseIndex UseGlossary Annotation Reply Embed Precedes
	Subdocument Present Search Supersedes History
	Includes Made Interested

For example you can do this:

<HEAD>
<TITLE>Chapter 2: Item 2</TITLE>
<LINK REL="Made" HREF="http://www.bsdi.com/hyplan/sanders.html">
<LINK REL="Precedes" HREF="/ch2/item3.html">
<LINK REV="Precedes" HREF="/ch2/item1.html">
<LINK REV="Subdocument" HREF="/ch2/index.html">
</HEAD>

With some minor hacks to an HTTP server (like Plexus) you could generate
these relationships on the fly.  An even clever server could use annotations
on the Made document (http://www.bsdi.com/hyplan/sanders.html) to generate
email to the person described (look ma, no mailto: URL; which IMHO a major
kludge anyway).

Something I want is <LINK REL="Navigation" HREF=".../nav-style.html">
which the browser renders in a special Nav section of it's user interface,
possibly in a popup, (yes this means you build the Nav UI on the fly for
each document but you could use caching).  Of course, the browser
could/would still provide it's standard Nav functions as well (or it might
provide a toggle between them or whatever).  This would let us do rapid
prototyping of different Navigation styles so we can figure out what works
best for different kinds of document spaces.

--sanders