Re: <PAGE> proposal

The examples may leave something to be desired, but the concept of
What DIV provides is a way of expressing the hierarchical nature
of your document.  Here are is an examples of how it could be used:
Try doing this with <P>
<DIV CLASS="Chapter">
<DIV CLASS="Section">
<P>...</P>
<P>...</P>
<DIV CLASS="Sub Section">
...
</DIV>
</DIV>
<DIV CLASS="Section">
<P>...</P>
<P>...</P>
</DIV>
</DIV>
<DIV CLASS="Appendix">
...
</DIV>

You could then have a viewer that allowed you to collapse part of the
hierarchy. You could write clients that would split documents into
smaller document along meaningful boundaries. You could use styles
to have indentation that nests well.

> 
> >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 19:58:10 UTC