Re: 3.1 b-h: BEHAVIOR

At 17:36 03/03/97 -0800, Tim Bray wrote:
>Anyhow,
>a standard built-in way to do a redirect seems to me like a useful thing;
>Lord knows it's a common enough need out on the Web... question: is there
>a standard way to do this now in HTML (I used to know) or do you have to 
>do it at the HTTP level via your server?  

Maybe, but surely the XML spec isn't the right place to provide such a
thing.  There's nothing specific to XML about redirection.  People shouldn't
have to have an XML client in order to do redirection.  It should be
something that's handled at the HTTP level: the HTTP server should be able
to recognize when there is a redirection and should generate the appropriate
302 response, which the client can handle also at the HTTP level.

>To help the debate, could someone think up
>the (6 please) possible values so we can see concrete alternatives?

I am sure these can be improved on:

Behave		Show	Actuate	Explanation
REF		REPLACE	USER	Like <A HREF="...">
REF-NEW		NEW	USER	Like <A HREF="..." TARGET="_new">
HIDE		INCLUDE USER    Something you can click on to reveal
REDIRECT	REPLACE	AUTO	User-level redirect
NEW		NEW	AUTO	Creates a new window
EMBED		INCLUDE	AUTO	Like IMG

I'm not very clear about the intended behaviour of SHOW=NEW ACTUATE=AUTO.
Suppose I have one of these links at the end of a long document.  Is the
window created when the document is loaded or when I scroll down to the end
of the document? If the latter, does it automatically disappear if I scroll
back to the beginning?  What user requirement are we trying to meet here?
Unless there's a clear user requirement for this, I think we should dump it.
My current feeling is we show have a single attribute with just four values:
REF, REF-NEW, HIDE and EMBED.

James

Received on Tuesday, 4 March 1997 00:24:23 UTC