Interactive HTML

I'm involved with a group who is writing up interactive html clients and
servers (best example is a virtual environment system (mud)).  Right now
there is a big push to simply "add more tags" because they would like to
distinguish certain 'actions' from other hypertextual markup.  Since the
use of html is not necessarly correct, since the base stream isn't hyper-
textual (i.e. you click on something and it will generally spawn a new
window).

First, I'll define an action as something such as pushing a button, or
walking through a doorway.  Right now people want to do:

    <a action=....>..</a>

Which grates on me personally :)  I'm trying to convince them that sticking
closer to the standard is best, but I cannot find a usable tag which would
work for defining this anchor as being of a different type or class.  I have
not read SGML specs, so I'm unsure as to what the CLASS attribute represents,
but what I feel would be best is something like:

    <a href="..." type=action>Push the Button</a>

Actions of this sort will happen no matter what, what I'm asking is what
syntax is most preferable?  I considered rel=... but that didn't seem
correct.

Also, I left out the href=... part because its using its own protocol,
based of HTTP-NG (since HTTP-NG seems to have died).  More specs on
this are at http://cold.org:8080/VEIL.html (for those curious enough).

I appreciate your time.

-Brandon Gillespie-

(BTW, if it comes down to it, i'd prefer to use an existing invalid
extension, at least that is not adding to the decay--so suggestions
in those directions are also appreciated).

Received on Sunday, 22 October 1995 18:59:50 UTC