Re: <PAGE> proposal

Walter Ian Kaye ([email protected])
Fri, 22 Dec 1995 15:36:27 -0800


At 2:00p 12/22/95, Eric S. Raymond wrote:

>I therefore propose a new tag, <PAGE>. When the browser encounters this
>tag, it should fill the display area with blank lines to the bottom. The
><PAGE> tag should also alter the scroll-forward behavior of the browser so that
>the space created by <PAGE> expands during scrolling to fill the display
>area until it is entirely blank, at which point the next scroll-forward
>skips to-of-display to just past the <PAGE> tag.

That would violate Human Interface guidelines for the MacOS (and perhaps
other systems as well) regarding scrollbar appearance and behavior. I think
Netscape's FRAMESET tags would do for this, as each frame can have its own
scrollbar, thus preserving expected behavior.

At 4:00p 12/22/95, Paul Jones wrote:

>> > <P CLEAR="page">
>> >

>I puzzled over the problem of how to force page breaks in a way that
>would fit in with existing HTML and noticed the CLEAR attribute. It
>already does similar kinds of things (depending on your definition of
>similar). Existing browsers just ignore it.

Wouldn't a series of, say, <NOPAGEBR>...</NOPAGEBR> be better as far as
printing is concerned? Sort of like MS Word's "Keep together" attribute.
This way, the UA can determine how many sections can fit on a page
depending on how large the page is and what fonts are used.

I hear Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft are working on printing extensions for
HTML, but I am unable to find any public documents (well, they only just
announced it, so perhaps something will appear in the near future).

-Walter

__________________________________________________________________________
Walter Ian Kaye <[email protected]> | Excel | FoxPro | AppleScript |
Mountain View, CA |--------- programmer ---------|
http://www.natural-innovations.com/ | Macintosh | Windows |