Re: pages

On Sun, 1 Jun 1997, Robert Partington wrote:

> > The concept of "pages" is not applicable print-only, and browsers/index
> > tools could benefit from <PAGE> tags by building appropriately paged 
> > "tables of contents".
> 
> you could build the table of contents from the H* tags already - i'm
> sure there's already at least one browser which offers a collapsible
> view (just the headings), if not, then i'll probably hack it into lynx
> when i get a spare weekend.  [ie4 and active-html can do this collapsible
> page-headers as well, but that's not in wide use yet]

Amaya does this. And in addition you can use the TOC view as a navigation 
facility. Very nice. I wish every browser would support such a feature so 
that authors could rely on it. This would probably also force authors to 
use headings more carefully than what they often do.

> > Also, HTML prints very poorly and could benefit highly from a
> > specified/implied.
> > Without a specified page break it is impossible to build formatted
> > reports that print well.
> > It is also impossible to have a "print to fit" option in a browser.
> 
> using something like "<div class=page>" would indicate that this might
> be a good place to break the page - but i don't think (again) that any
> browsers actually support that, or that it's a particularly good idea
> because you can't know how big the paper is, how big the printing font
> is etc.  same as in html really.

I would be in favor of adding markup for page footers and the like so 
that browsers could improve document rendering both on paper and screen. 
But marking pages would go completely against the idea of separating the 
presentation from the structure. Only the browser when rendering the 
document knows the size of the actual page.

Arnaud Le Hors - W3C, User Interface Domain - www.w3.org/People/Le Hors

Received on Sunday, 1 June 1997 08:55:09 UTC