Re: Control areas ?

Chris Lilley, Computer Graphics Unit (lilley@v5.cgu.mcc.ac.uk)
Tue, 22 Nov 1994 21:37:55 +0100

Sean Martin wrote, about non-scrolling header and footer elements as a propsed
HTML addition:

> 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>

Better yet, the sketch DTD says "Note that multiple body sections are permitted
and that you can specify whether a section floats or is glued to one of the
window sides"

Depending on whether you describe a rectangolar window as having two or four
sides ;-) this might provide exactly what is being asked for, without any
extensions.

--
Chris