Re: Control areas ?

Tony Sanders (sanders@bsdi.com)
Wed, 23 Nov 1994 01:49:40 +0100

Chris Lilley, Computer Graphics Unit writes:
> 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?
Exactly. And if you check the www-talk archives you will see a proposal
from me for a section called <NAV>...</NAV> about a year and half ago that
proposes pretty much exactly this.

> > Perhaps it could go into the &lt;header&gt; area ?
> The head area is not intended for this sort of information. Your proposed top
Correct.

> 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.
Then they can just ignore it. Presention should be left to the browser
as much as possible, as always.

> 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.
My proposal was that it go between <HEAD> and <BODY>.

> <body role=top> top stuff>
> <body role=bottom> bottom stuff>
It's very bad to put structural information inside the attributes,
if you use <NAV> then you can validated the document against the DTD,
you cannot do that if it is inside an attribute.