Popup: Please comment, Is there anything left of my original proposal?

Hi!

As many people have pointed out, my proposal was both needed and full of 
holes.  

I have once again thought about everything and here's my final proposal 
for "the popup windows in HTML 3.0".  It's very similar to the <FN> tag, 
only minor points have been added.  I have ceased "reinventing the 
wheel", and settled for bettering it.

One of the main goals is still to let popup window text reside at any 
HTML file, so they necessarily wouldn't have to be in the same file they 
were refered from.  This way one is free to use separate dictionary.html 
file (when useful) to gather all the words into one place.  

One big loss from my original proposal, and the one that makes me most 
angry and sad, is that the <FN> is (contrary to my original) not 
compatible with any of the old, non HTML 3.0 browsers. The users of the 
old browsers would not propably even find the popup/footnote texts (they 
would see the links thou).

---
First the <A HREF>:

It would be practical to notice the browser beforehand that it must load 
the upcoming text into a popup window.  For this purpose there are two 
solutions.

1.	The first one is the TARGET=_popup, along with alternative
	WIDTH=xx and HEIGHT=yy attributes (the targetting way isn't a 
	very good one, if we want to be nice to users of the current 
	netscape version). 
	It could look like this:

	<A HREF="dictionary.html#theword TARGET=_popup WIDTH=400>

2.	The other one, and the one I would like, is to define it a popup 
	in the style sheet.  (Optional values are marked with "[]")


		A.popup	{[render=]popup
			[width=xx]
			[height=yy]}

		<A HREF="dictionary.html#theword" CLASS=popup>

	This way we could have multiple popup windows (don't know if 
	there were any use for such), as the target would be left for 
	individualizing (naming) them.
---
Then the <FN> tag:

It would be just like proposed in the HTML 3.0

For example:

<FN ID="theword">
<P><H1><I>The word<I></H1>
<P>Theword is a nice word.
</FN>

The ID is the same as NAME.  Both will do!

---
Printing

Intelligent HTML 3.0 browsers could print each popup/footnote text in the 
footer (bottom) of the page they were refered on.

Other HTML 3.0 browsers could print a separate page(s) for them.

Non HTML 3.0 browsers would have nothing to worry about as their users 
wouldn't even find the footnotes (which is sad).

---
(Nearly) all comments and critic welcome!

There is no HTML version of this one yet.  I will notify you, if I get 
one done (they are always much nicer to read).

-- 
Heikki Vesalainen
http://www.clinet.fi/~wes/
wes@clinet.fi

Received on Friday, 22 March 1996 18:10:30 UTC