Re: Tag proposal

Ka-Ping Yee wrote:
>On Fri, 8 Mar 1996, Zenon Panoussis wrote:
>> New HTML link tag proposal.
>[...]
>> The trouble with links is that they can take you anywhere, and you never
>> know beforehand where that will be. What hides behind a link can be the
>> final answer to the main question, or a silly connection to somebody's
>> silly home page. You never know beforehand.
>
>I agree that knowing the role of a given link is important.  However,
>there has been a way to do this in HTML for a very long time -- it's
>just that browser implementors have, for the most part, ignored it.

See below for good news, but first:

[...]
><link rev="MADE" href="mailto:the-author">
>
>in the document's HEAD, thus indicating that "the-author" MADE the
>containing document.  There are several useful suggested values for REL
>and REV in a discussion paper on the topic by Murray Maloney, which you
>can find at
>
>http://ogopogo.nttc.edu/tools/html/mmaloney_links.html

The Internet Draft version of this, by Murray Maloney and Lee Quin, is more
current:

ftp://ds.internic.net/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-html-relrev-00.txt

>So, in short, the mechanism to do what you want is certainly there.
>All we have to do is convince a browser manufacturer to implement
>this mechanism.

Ok, we're convinced.  :-)

NCSA Mosaic for Windows supports the LINK tag in the upcoming version 2.2,
now in the hands of alpha-testers.  Each LINK tag results in a button being
added to a special toolbar.  Clicking on the button takes the action
(follows the link) associated with the LINK tag.  The implementation is
done; we're now working on niggling details like whether we should display
text in the buttons or just icons, what the icons should be, and so on.
Feedback from alpha-testers has been positive.

We expect to have a public beta release of 2.2 probably in early April.

mag

--
.---o  Tom Magliery, Research Programmer                         .---o
`-O-.  NCSA, 605 E. Springfield                  (217) 333-3198  `-O-.
o---'  Champaign, IL 61820          O-        mag@ncsa.uiuc.edu  o---'

Received on Friday, 8 March 1996 13:38:36 UTC