Re: Relationship Taxonomy Questions

   At 07:33 AM 1/23/97 -0800, Terry Allen wrote:
   >If part of my document's text is included through a link, *and the
   >document is being displayed*, the included text must be displayed when 
   >downloaded so as to display the full text as I intended it, complete 
   >with safety warnings, etc.  Else I can't rely on my data format to
   >convey my content, and the XML format is useless for practical
   >purposes, however interesting it may be for hypertext theory.

Eliot replied:
   But you can't *ever* do this with SGML or XML or any other generalized
   format unless you control both the server and browser.  Even on the Web I

I obviously interpreted differently what Terry wrote. I understood him
to mean a document X, part of which is composed of the whole or part of
some other document Y, eg
 
   X
   para of mine
   para of mine
   <--------------- para taken from the middle of another doc (Y)
   para of mine
   etc

Obviously it is possible to do this with only browser control: just
it's inefficient in bandwidth to have to get the whole of doc Y, only
to drop some of it on the floor. And I thought invisible transclusion
was evil, anyway :-)

   No generalized data representation scheme can *ever* guarantee behavior of
   any sort--that can only be done by defining the specific presentation and
   [...]

Right, but I didn't think we were trying to do this anyway. We're
developing the infrastructure to allow browsers to extend their
behavior. I think.

///Peter

Received on Thursday, 23 January 1997 17:13:02 UTC