> The approach used in the SDL is to have a document be a collection
> of virtual pages where a virtual page is much like today's HTML document.
> However, the virtual page collection can be managed as a single entity,
> and sytles sheets or other doc set information only needs to be
> instanced once.
> In addition, it provides a comfortable place to place an index, table
> of contents, glossary, etc.
For existing browsers, HTML nodes are standalone. I have been thinking about
this for some time as is evident from the various drafts for HTML+. You can
use the LINK element in the document head to define relationships between
nodes, for instance: index, table of contents, glossary, etc. You can also
define parent->child relationships and use these to imply LINK elements in
child nodes. This is also applicable to hypertext paths. I have recently
added the SRC attribute to LINK in a bid to allow authors to use images
for links which are intended appear in a document specific toolbar. I hope
to provide a practical demonstration of these ideas at the WWW Conference
in May. Here are some of the relationship types that have been proposed:
o REL="Subdocument" (<A> and <LINK> elements ?)
Used by a parent document to specify child nodes. This relation can be used
to propagate properties of the parent node to their children, e.g. Style
Sheets and Contents "pages". (use REV attribute for child->parent links).
o REL="Contents" (<LINK> element)
Used to specify a node which acts as a document contents "page". May be
inherited from a parent document as described above.
o REL="StyleSheet" (<LINK> element)
Used to specify an associated style sheet. May be inherited from a parent
document as described above.
o REL="Path" (<A> element)
Used in a node specifying a hypertext path to insert a path defined in
another node.
o REL="Node" (<A> element)
Used in a node specifying a hypertext path to specify a node on that path.
o REL="Previous" (<LINK> element)
Used in a node to specify the previous node on a hypertext path. This is
implied when a separate node is acting as a hypertext path
o REL="Next" (<LINK> element)
Used in a node to specify the next node on a hypertext path. This is implied
when a separate node is acting as a hypertext path
o REL="Bookmark" (<LINK> element)
This is used to specify interesting bookmarks. These are labelled via the
TITLE attribute or as images using the SRC attribute.
Dave Raggett