> Seems to me that this might be a good idea.
Could well be. Although is this a navigation area, rather than footers as in for
footnotes, or for footing text as in printed documents?
> It would need an HTML
> extention but I doubt that this would be consistent with SGML.
Why not? Any particular reason, or a vague feeling?
> Perhaps it could go into the <header> area ?
The head area is not intended for this sort of information. Your proposed top
and bottom tags would contain information to be displayed in the document, so on
that basis they should go in the body element
On the other hand, the suggestion seemed to be that the document window be split
into three, with the central part scrolling. Given that the top and bottom
areas, which might be multiple lines or contain various sized images, would be
of different sizes - or not present at all - this would require a new scrolling
display widget for each document which could prove expensive on some systems.
Browsers that parse the HTML as it streams in, and display it before the stream
has finished, would need to know about the top and bottom elements early on.
Perhaps, in HTML 3, which I believe can contain multiple body parts .... yup he
said, checking, the top and bottom parts could have their own body parts
restricted to come before the others.
Eg
<doctype stuff><html>
<head> etc</head>
<body role=top> top stuff>
<body role=bottom> bottom stuff>
<body> body material</body>
<body> another bunch of body material</body>