Re: Frame document structure (fwd)

\\ I agree that the bulk of the functionality could be represented as
\\ LINKs, if people were willing to standardize a few REL values, though
\\ the use of LINKs doesn't help at all with the bookmarking issue,
\\ assuming you care about bookmarking a multi-window configuration.

LINKs can't do everything frames can, I agree. You might need to put
together more pages if you chose to use LINK, if you had multiple primary
documents in the frames. However, most of the framed documents worth a damn
I have come across have a title, a navigator and a main document. This
could VERY easily be done using LINK.

As for bookmarking in this simple a scenario, given that you have one
primary document with links to a title and a navigation bar, you simply
need to bookmark the current main document. Saves quite a bit of trouble.

\\ I
\\ don't think these concerns fit well in the current scope of stylesheets
\\ - although perhaps they could be abstracted in an orthogonal LAYOUT
\\ specification mechanism.

Well, that is what I meant, an extension to CSS would be needed.

\\ I have to disagree, though, with the notion that it is entirely a
\\ presentation issue.  The collection of frames and frame contents and
\\ their interrelationships is very much a structural issue.

Frames as currently implemented make it a presentation issue. Specifying
structural relationships between multiple documents and using them to
present information I agree can be very powerful, though not needed in most
instances.

I think the problem is that HTML was designed to be stateless, but with the
introduction of frames pages suddenly have state. You don't just need to
know the page that contains the frameset, but also the current state of the
pages to be able to do anything with them effectively.

\\ I tend to
\\ think the right way to handle this is with a DTD for compound documents,
\\ which would allow an author to express the needed relationships and
\\ would also allow the browser to use the same notation to synthesize the
\\ current state of a compound document (what the pieces are at the moment
\\ and the locations within them) so that it could save it as a local file
\\ it could point a bookmark at.

This would be nice, but I doubt anyone would be willing to put in the
effort and do something this useful.

Sunil

Received on Friday, 6 September 1996 13:47:19 UTC