concurrent relationships pertaining to one element

I hear that HTML 4 is not very changeable at this point.  I still
think that we should try to get some things in HTML now that will
let us build accessibility capability using these general capabilities.

One capability that looms large in my current understanding of
the problem is the ability to annotate an element (DIV, A, etc.)
with more than one reference to another thing.  If you will pardon
my writing fractured HTML, what you want is something functionally
comparable to 

	<A (REL=... REF=...)
	   (REV=... REF=...)
	   HREF=...
	   NAME=... > Content of anchor </A>

One critical use for this is threading text together in the correct
reading order when, for example, tables are used to construct a
page that looks like two-column text format.  Here the SUCC and
PRED relationships can be used to thread text-containing blocks,
whether they be FRAME, DIV, TD or whatever.

We can't assume that the content is a tree, as is true for a
text.  The content of a modern web page is a subweb.  What we
need to do to capture this graph structure is to have a generic
capability in the HTML language that will permit the encoding of
the graph semantics of the page structure, for browsers to reflow
appropriately to the media context in which they are operating.
Styles furnished by the author are an optional aid in this
function; the function must work without the author taking
that extra step.

--
Al Gilman

Received on Sunday, 3 August 1997 15:08:05 UTC