Re: <PAGE> proposal

>The pointless kludge may in fact be an answer, a Mike Meyer surmised.
>Consider <DIV CLASS="Paged">...</DIV>. The semantics of the "paged" CLASS 
>is that only one DIV is considered "viewable" at any time, i.e. as long 
>as some part of a DIV is "visible", no other DIV segment should be.  

   The reason I call <DIV> a pointless kluge (I looked up the spelling 
in the Jargon file--boy am I embarassed!) is that it's only reason for 
existance seems to be to patch up the deficient behavior of other tags. 

   There's no functional difference between, say . . . 

      (this is the example of <div> from the html3 docs at w3.org)

      <DIV CLASS=Abstract> <P>text </DIV> 

      and 

      <P CLASS=Abstract> text </P>

   or 

      <DIV ALIGN=RIGHT><IMG SRC="foo.gif"></DIV>

      and 

      <IMG SRC="foo.gif" ALIGN=RIGHT>

   The only reason I can see for <DIV>'s existance is to do stuff 
like:  <DIV CLEAR=LEFT><IMG SRC="foo.gif"></DIV> since there's no 
"clear" attribute in <IMG>. It seems to me that it would make a 
lot more sense to fix the broken tags then to add a kluge. 

   Why can't <IMG> have a "clear" attribute? (then Netscape wouldn't 
have had to kluge the ALIGN attribute!) Why can't people learn to use 
<P> as a container (besides the fact that many browsers still don't 
implement it right <g>)? 

   So if you think the CLASS attribute would work for this, that's 
fine . . . but why not have a <PAGE> tag for it, instead of further 
patching a kluge to fix another deficiency in the definition. 


+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
 * BearHeart / Bill Weinman 
 * BearHeart@bearnet.com *            * http://www.bearnet.com/ *
 * Author of The CGI Book:    * http://www.bearnet.com/cgibook/ *
 * 'Tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers. --Shakespeare

Received on Friday, 22 December 1995 19:52:23 UTC