Re: Header, Footer, and Sidebars

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At 07:15 AM 26/11/97 -0500, David Norris wrote:
>Basically, my thought is to
>rid ourselves of frames in favor of a CSS property that does it without
>requiring a 'compatible' graphical user agent.  Backward and forward
>compatibility is the key.  Older agents ignore it and newer agents 
enhance
>it.

This is exactly what Andrew's example [1] provides.

>It is perfectly feasible to have a
>block tag to position the text in a permanent location along one edge in 
a
>graphical agent, though.

No, HTML is not a presentation language.  However, you can use DIV to mark 
a block as somehow different (as in Andrew's "footer", etc.), and then use 
CSS2 to position that block in a permanent location along one edge in a 
graphical agent.  Again, that's what Andrew's example does.

>A user
>agent, in an environment where this would not work, could simply ignore 
that
>docking info and render the page top to bottom.  This page would be
>perfectly readable by any user agent, old or new.

Provided by Andrew's example.  A user agent, in an environment where this 
would not work, would ignore the docking info and render the page top to 
bottom--currently header, then sidebar, then main, then footer.  Perfect.  
(Some may prefer the sidebar to be after main; this is a simple change.)

>The problem, currently, is that it requires careful use of CSS.

Visual authoring tools could make it easier.

>A less knowledgeable author could destroy
>a document's value by ignorantly misusing your example.

I can destroy any document's value with ignorance, even if it uses only 
HTML 2.0 and no CSS.

[1] http://www.media-electronica.com/%7Eamarshal/Tests/divframes.html

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--
Liam Quinn
Web Design Group            Enhanced Designs, Web Site Development
http://www.htmlhelp.com/    http://enhanced-designs.com/

Received on Wednesday, 26 November 1997 10:04:46 UTC