What you want are <LINK>'s which are defined in HTML but no one implements
them so I guess no one really wants to use them very badly :-)
See Also
<http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/Elements/LINK.html>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
Typical uses are to indicate authorship, related indexes and glossaries,
older or more recent versions, etc. Links can indicate a static tree
structure in which the document was authored by pointing to a "parent"
and "next" and "previous" document, for example.
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/Relationships.html>
The defined relationship values are:
UseIndex UseGlossary Annotation Reply Embed Precedes
Subdocument Present Search Supersedes History
Includes Made Interested
For example you can do this:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Chapter 2: Item 2</TITLE>
<LINK REL="Made" HREF="http://www.bsdi.com/hyplan/sanders.html">
<LINK REL="Precedes" HREF="/ch2/item3.html">
<LINK REV="Precedes" HREF="/ch2/item1.html">
<LINK REV="Subdocument" HREF="/ch2/index.html">
</HEAD>
With some minor hacks to an HTTP server (like Plexus) you could generate
these relationships on the fly. An even clever server could use annotations
on the Made document (http://www.bsdi.com/hyplan/sanders.html) to generate
email to the person described (look ma, no mailto: URL; which IMHO a major
kludge anyway).
Something I want is <LINK REL="Navigation" HREF=".../nav-style.html">
which the browser renders in a special Nav section of it's user interface,
possibly in a popup, (yes this means you build the Nav UI on the fly for
each document but you could use caching). Of course, the browser
could/would still provide it's standard Nav functions as well (or it might
provide a toggle between them or whatever). This would let us do rapid
prototyping of different Navigation styles so we can figure out what works
best for different kinds of document spaces.
--sanders