Re: comments on HTML+ discussion document
ellson@hotsand.att.com
From: ellson@hotsand.att.com
Date: Mon, 1 Nov 93 22:44:18 EST
Original-From: hotsand!ellson (John Ellson)
Message-id: <9311020344.AA17692@hotsand.dacsand>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: comments on HTML+ discussion document
> Maybe this UI will work, I was trying to express the relationships with
> my diagram but that might be overly complicated. I like your table layout
> though Pgup/Pgdown don't quite seem to fit. Maybe we need icons. The
> corners navigate the explicit Subdocument and Precedes links.
>
> Up | Back | Preceding
> ---------+---------+-----------
> Previous | Home | Next
> ---------+---------+-----------
> Down | Forward | Following
>
I was trying to chose something that aligned with the cursor keys on
my keyboard in the expectation that people will want to map them as
shortcuts. My keypad has the following, is this fairly standard?
Home | ^ | PgUp
---------+---------+-----------
< | | >
---------+---------+-----------
End | v | PgDn
Back, Forward, Previous, Next, seem to map well, but I think that Home
in the center would be confusing (at least on this keypad) which was
why I proposed "Reload" in the center.
My keypad also has "-", "+", and Enter which would be great for
stepping through the hyperlinks in the body of the document and then
selecting one with the Enter key.
A certain overworked person ;-) suggested that it would be nice if
we could do this from the server side, instead of reinventing the
browser. Seems like a good idea except that I think we need a couple of hooks.
Firstly I think we need a non-scrolled region of the browser
that can be defined by HTML text in the <head> of the document;
with normal scrolled text being defined in the <body>.
Secondly, the behaviors of these buttons must still be provided by
the browser. All we can do in the html document is to attach a user
specified icon or anchor to a specific behavior (and perhaps enable
or disable the behavior).
Perhaps we should think about the HTML+ issues first?
How about the following:
<control home> ... </control>
<control back> ... </control>
<control forward> ... </control>
<control reload> ... </control>
<control next=(url)> ... </control>
<control previous=(url)> ... </control>
<control following=(url)> ... </control>
<control preceding=(url)> ... </control>
I've probably got the syntax all messed up. How would this fit with
the LINK directive?
John Ellson
AT&T Bell Labs