Re: INS, DEL, and changes

On Thu, 18 Sep 1997, Doug Sheppard wrote:

> (Sent only to -editor to avoid spam harvesters, unfortunately...)
Its getting worse every day!

> Given the www-html discussion on the problems of indicating
> changes with INS and DEL, and a suggestion of a new CHANGE or CHG
> tag, I'd like to suggest a new attribute for INS, REPLACES instead
> of another tag: 
> 
> <!attlist INS
>   REPLACES	ID	#IMPLIED -- points to previous version --
> >
> 
> It'd work <DEL ID="one">somewhat</DEL> <INS REPLACES="one">just</INS>
> like this.  The user agent would be able to indicate revision and
> provide a way of seeing the original text.
> 
> Whether or not CDATA is appropriate for this attribute is another
> question; it might also be possible that pointing to a URL of the
> previous revision is useful.  Would it be of value to also add this
> attribute to DEL, if it gets into INS?

Work is underway for richer ways to express meta-data. INS and DEL
therefore don't provide extensive means to represent previous
versions etc. The id, cite, datetime and title attributes should
be sufficient. ID can be used by meta-data to name the INS or DEL
element, CITE allows you to point to such meta data or an informal
description for the reason for the change, previous version, who
made the change etc. DATETIME was a recent addition which can be
used to highlight changes since a given date etc. TITLE can be
used to include an informal note describing the change in place
in the html document.

Regards,

-- Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett
phone: +44 122 578 2521 (office) +44 385 320 444 (gsm mobile)
World Wide Web Consortium (on assignment from HP Labs)

Received on Monday, 22 September 1997 05:24:41 UTC