Re: a bad idea (fwd)

On Sat, 13 Jul 1996, Walter Ian Kaye wrote:

> At 7:22p -0700 07/12/96, MegaZone wrote:
> >Once upon a time Marc Salomon shaped the electrons to say...
> >>|<IMG SRC="x" SRC="y" SRC="n-1" "SRC="n" PICK=RANDOM>
> >>
> >>SGML won't allow multiple occurances of an attribute in an element.  Sorry.
> >
> >Yeah, that's too bad...
> >
> >How about:
> ><IMG SRC="x" PICKLIST="y,n-1,n" PICK=RANDOM>
> 
> 
> How about...
> 
> <HEAD>
> <META NAME="altgifs" CONTENT="http://foo.com/b.gif http://foo.com/c.gif">
> </HEAD>
> 
> <IMG SRC="http://foo.com/a.gif" PICKLIST="altgifs" PICK=RANDOM>
> 
> Predefine the lists in the <head>, and reference from the body.
> 
> Would this break any SGML rules?

I would prefer:

<IMG SRC="http://foo.com/a.gif" metric="1">
<IMGALT SRC="http://bar.com/a.gif" metric="1">
<IMGALT SRC="http://mirror.bar.com/a.gif" metric="2">
</IMG>

and

<A HREF="http://foo.com/" metric="1">
<HREFALT HREF="http://bar.com/" metric=1">
<HREFALT HREF="http://mirror.bar.com/" metric="2">
Bad stuff
</a>

Much more intuitive to the page author. Is there any compelling reason we
can't do this? It seems to me to be the really obvious way to do it and
should not break older browsers. Honestly, I've never quite figured out
why turning IMG into a container wasn't used as the backward compatible
route out of the mess involving its introduction (yes - I realize that
IMG's content model would be much more restricted than FIG...ah...EMBED
...er...INSERT...uh...OBJECT... - but they need multi-host functionality
added too.) 

Being 'unpretty' doesn't really count when no 'pretty' solution has been
offered as an alternative. No proposal that tries to dump all the
alternate addresses into lists in the head will be regarded as 'pretty' by
page authors. 'Pointless authoring overhead' is the phrase that comes to
mind. I don't want to have to look at some other place in the document to
figure out where a link is going. It isn't like stylesheets where I expect
to re-use the information many times per page and on many pages.

-- 
Benjamin Franz

Received on Sunday, 14 July 1996 00:02:17 UTC