> >Can those who are communicating with the informal HTML development
> >outside IBM suggest the addition in the browsers of an area on the
> >browser frame, of a top (header) and bottom (footer) area, It would be
> >nice to have this plus an html tag which allowed specification of either
> >an image map, a set of icons, or a set of char strings with html anchors
> >'<a HREF=' in these areas. Thus your 'icons' for forward and backward
> >page movement, search and navigation would not scroll with the document
> >and you wouldn't have to go all the way to the top or bottom of a long
> >file to get to them.
> Seems to me that this might be a good idea. It would need an HTML
> extention but I doubt that this would be consistent with SGML. Perhaps it
> could go into the <header> area ? Would anyone more knowledgeable care
> to comment ?
Sounds like what you want is something akin to the already-specified
'link' tag. For something like a navigational panel, you could do:
<head>
<link rel="made" href="mailto:wmperry@spry.com">
<link rel="toc" href="url-of-table-of-contents">
<link rel="previous" href="url-of-parent-document">
<link rel="next" href="url-of-next-document">
<link rel="blah" href="someurl">
<title>Some HTML document</title>
</head>
Then you could create a 'mail to author' link, table of contents, back,
forward, etc, buttons. Perhaps a SRC and ALIGN attribute similar to the
<img> and <fig> tags could be used to specify an image to use instead of
reasonable defaults per browser.
-Bill P.