HTML3

Michael Johnson (michaelj@relay.relay.com)
Thu, 01 Dec 94 14:04:45 EST 

Subject: HTML3
Message-Id: <MICHAELJ.941201140445@relay.relay.com>
From: michaelj@relay.relay.com (Michael Johnson)
To: www-html@www0.cern.ch (HTML discussion list)
Date:    Thu, 01 Dec 94 14:04:45 EST

I see that the HTML+ INDEX attribute has gotten dropped. I'd like to see that
resurrected as well, with a more concrete definition. The HTML+ spec was
unclear on how to handle index terms after the first pair. May I suggest that
pairs of index terms always be treated as primary/secondary pairs, so that
the syntax of an INDEX attribute would be:

  INDEX="primary[/[secondary][/primary[/[secondary]...]]]"

Where primary and secondary are phrases. For example:

  INDEX="tags/markup/markup/tags"
  INDEX="language/generalized markup/generalized markup/language/GML//SGML"

These might result in index terms that look like these:

  markup
    tags
  .
  .
  .
  tags
    markup

and

  generalized markup
    language
  GML
  .
  .
  .
  language
    generalized markup
  .
  .
  .
  SGML

As with the HTML+ spec, the INDEX attribute would be used by an index-building
program (which could be a module of a browser) to build an index for one or
more HTML documents.

Michael Johnson
Relay Technology, Inc.