Re: <PAGE> proposal
William C. Cheng ([email protected])
Sat, 23 Dec 1995 18:17:22 -0500
BearHeart / Bill Weinman <[email protected]> wrote:
| At 11:03 am 12/23/95 -0500, William C. Cheng wrote:
| >Eric S. Raymond <[email protected]> wrote:
|
| >| This objection, and all others like it, fails to address one of my central
| >| points. Please try to stop thinking of <PAGE> as document-controlled
| >| pagination (though I certainly want to use it that way) and start thinking
| >| of it as an attempt to decouple display behavior from underlying file
| >| representation.
|
| >But it seems to me that having separate scrollable sections _couples_
| >display behavior with file representation. <PAGE> doesn't seem to have
| >any meaning to anything but displays (or printing, which is another kind
| >of display).
|
| Perhaps in the sense that it adds a functionality that addresses
| an issue for a medium that is otherwise not supported. But in the
| strict sense, it is decoupling the HTML file representation from the
| display behavior of "browser-with-screen", which should not be the
| only medium supported.
|
| Someone in here earlier said that they see a "page" as being like
| a "screenful" (not a direct quote)--and that's the mentality that Eric's
| proposal seeks to address.
|
| A "page" as a type of object that current HTML ignores. I agree with
| Eric that we need to correct that.
Clearly, the word "screenful" implies a display of some kind. HTML ignores
it probably because such an object has nothing to do with the structure of
an HTML document. I'm not usre if there's anything to "correct" here. The
proper place for it seems to be in style sheets (given the desire to
achieve such an effect).
--
Bill Cheng // Guest at Columbia Unversity Computer Science Department
[email protected] ...!{uunet|ucbvax}!cs.columbia.edu!william
WWW Home Page: <URL:http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~william>