- From: Benjamin Franz <snowhare@netimages.com>
- Date: Sat, 16 Aug 1997 05:14:29 -0700 (PDT)
- To: www-html@w3.org
On Fri, 15 Aug 1997, Walter Ian Kaye wrote: > At 3:25p -0700 08/15/97, E. Stephen Mack wrote: > > > > While HTML itself does not care whether a page scrolls horizontally > > or vertically, the draft does seem to make the assumption that > > pags will be scrolled vertically. For example, there are statements > > And there is also the matter of how we read text. Since HTML was designed > without <table>, its constructs were geared toward text. In a mode where > the document were to wrap vertically and scroll horizontally, how would > one read lines of text? It just doesn't work that way (as far as humans > reading is concerned), thus the text wraps horizontally and scrolls > vertically. This is also the way all Word Processors behave -- the words > are wrapped horizontally and the document scrolls vertically. This was > not a paradigm invented just for HTML -- it's simply the way *we* read. Unless you happen to have a language that runs some other way than horizontal then vertical. Japanese, for example, can run top->bottom, right->left (and often does in printed media). This would most naturally result in a need to scroll to the *left* to read text as you extended into the document. I haven't seen a browser that can handle that (not saying there isn't one, just that I haven't seen one). So when you say 'the way we read' you are limiting yourself to a particular sub-set of 'we' and 'reading'. The need for a <VR> in such a configuration is obvious. It is not at all clear to me how the current table model and VALIGN/ALIGN in general would be fit into top->bottom, left-right text flow. -- Benjamin Franz
Received on Saturday, 16 August 1997 08:14:32 UTC