Re: THEAD & TFOOT for columns

At 6:27 PM -0000 8/14/97, Walter Ian Kaye wrote:
>At 12:04p -0600 08/14/97, Neil St.Laurent wrote:
> >
> > Nothing in the language was meant for horizontal scrolling,
> > you can look all over the place in the language to find errors
> > if horizontal scrolling is required.
> >
> > HTML as far as I can tell was designed for Portrait layout and
> > pretty much lacks any capacity to do landscape layout.
>
>Having to scroll in two directions is extra work for the user;
>limiting scrolling to only one direction cuts the work in half.
>And vertical scrolling is much more "natural" than horizontal
>scrolling. I think this is based on gravity; if you go back in
>time to when scribes published on actual *scrolls*, the scroll
>orientation was usually vertical -- you could drop the lower
>scroll to the ground and then read whilst operating only the
>upper scroll. Try that with horizontal papyrus and your neck
>will hurt. ;)

What if the user has to go in the other direction; what if, as people have
mentioned, they are dealing with a many-columned work?  I think one problem
with HTML that has been posed by almost every facet of people dealing with
information/content (ie, artists, authors, accountants...) who *aren't* in
the standard scientific-academic field is that it clearly was developed
originally with an academic essay-style in mind.  There is no real reason
why HTML *shouldn't* allow Horizontal scrolling.  The fact that it doesn't
exist simply reinforces the idea that HTML had a narrow origin.  Let's
broaden it, shall we?

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[                    Jordan Reiter                     ]
[            mailto:jreiter@mail.slc.edu               ]
[ "You can't just say, 'I don't want to get involved.' ]
[  The universe got you involved."  --Hal Lipset, P.I. ]
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Received on Saturday, 16 August 1997 13:10:45 UTC