Re: SGML objects

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Date: Wed, 11 Aug 93 08:58:29 PDT
From: weber@yoyo.eitech.com (Jay C. Weber)
Message-id: <9308111558.AA06862@yoyo>
To: WWW-TALK@nxoc01.cern.ch, lou@vax.ox.ac.uk
Subject: Re: SGML objects
Status: RO

> From: Lou Burnard <lou@vax.ox.ac.uk>
> 
> Jay C Weber writes
> 
> >"Objects" in SGML sources are easy to define, just divide the source
> >into tag instances and the text among them, and number sequentially.
> 
> This is a *very* low-powered way of looking at an SGML document! An SGML
> document is a tree, for heaven's sake. 

I hear you, it just seems like overkill to drag in the hierarchical
structure when both versions have the "all bets are off when you have
ordinal references applying to incorrect versions" problem.

On second thought, it would be much more concise to delete an entire
section, i.e., it would be handy for addressing the interior nodes in
the document tree, as opposed to addressing the leaves.

Speaking of sections, your point is well taken about HTML missing chances
to define structure, especially with sectioning tags.  Could HTML+ define
an <H> tag, which is a container?  Doesn't sound hard to implement, just
incremement and decrement a level counter and do the same thing as
explicit tags of that level.  Browsers can choose a threshold beyond
which formatting doesn't change.

Jay