Re: Generic LIST Element Proposal

Michael J Hannah ([email protected])
Tue, 1 Aug 1995 11:16:28 +0700


Thanks to Ka-Ping Yee for his the suggestion about linking to the
archived message in my proposal document. I have taken his suggestion
to heart and have inserted those links. You can now see that I simply
had him attributed to the wrong thread. I knew his name was associated
with one of the threads, sorry to have put it on the wrong one.

On Mon, 31 Jul 1995 20:14:23 wrote Ka-Ping Yee <[email protected]>
++
++ I had a look at this, and i like the concept. Aiming for simplicity and
++ separation of presentation into style sheets is generally something i
++ agree with. It's the way i would like things to have been done the first
++ time around, i think -- but then the resistance to removing OL and UL
++ may be so strong that their slight semantic meaning may entrench them in
++ the language. There will be more resistance due to the added markup for
++ producing numbers, unfortunately. I've often thought that a good way
++ around this would be for macros to operate in some way -- shortcuts that
++ would let you do things properly in HTML 3.0, with as little typing (or
++ less) than half-baked HTML 2 and/or NHTML hacks. Perhaps i'll consider
++ how to do this more formally when i have some time.
++
++ The automatic numbering ability is particularly attractive, though i'd
++ look for a way to reference numbers previously used. (For instance,
++ if you number a figure with <num id="fig">, how can you make "please
++ see Figure 3" appear in the text? Tricky. Maybe requires two identifiers?)

As mentioned in the comments about <NUM> concerning my use of ID, I am not
sure that I used it correctly. If ID is to refer to that single instance
of the markup element, then I have used it incorrectly in my proposal and
need the second attribute I suggested (COUNTER). With that being the case,
then ID could mark the specific value, and another attribute (similar to
the TO attribute of TAB) could reference. I would suggest VAL with the
two uses being:
set the value by: <NUM ID="gworb" COUNTER="sections">
reference by: <NUM COUNTER="sections" VAL="gworb">
and specify that the use of VAL does not modify the value of the counter,
only references it.

Does this do what you are suggesting Ka-Ping Yee?

Michael