Re: Comments on HTMl 4 draft (9/Nov/1997)

On 26 Dec 1997, Peter Flynn wrote:

>    What we need are a few additions to section 9.2.1, like
> 
>    <MORE> Indicates means for getting further information on the topic
>    discussed.
> 
> This is crazy. What's wrong with <A title="More info" href="foo.html">...</a>

Nothing wrong, assuming that the strings "More info" and "foo.html"
are replaced by something which is really helpful in a particular
context. (Triviality? Perhaps. But there is an astonishing number
of Web pages with titles like "HTML document for the World Wide Web",
and they aren't even docs about HTML. :-)

But it simply defines a link, as opposite to marking a part of document
as providing information which does not belong to the main flow of
content in the document (such as suggestions for additional reading
in a textbook-like document). Such a part may contain additional
information embedded or provide information about such information,
e.g. as hypertext links or as bibliographic references.

>    <COMMENT> Indicates text which comments on adjacent paragraphs.
> 
>    Obviously the CSS2 authors would love a <COMMENT> element, what with their
>    [Brian: Do we need this?] [Paul: Yes I think we do] and stuff... :-)
> 
> This is equally crazy. Go and look at the commentary apparatus in the
> Synex browser (eg Panorama or MultiDoc Pro: confusingly they call
> their nests of comments "webs", but that's just an abberration).

I wonder how this related to the HTML language. HTML is a simple hypertext
markup language for the WWW. The question whether it is _too_ simple in
some respects sounds legitimate to me and is not really answered by
referring to apparatuses outside HTML and WWW, except possibly as
suggesting, by analogues, that there _is_ some need to extend HTML.

> I somehow doubt HTML itself is going to be extended much more.

This discussion list is rather futile if we think so. I am often
inclined to think that way, but during those periods I don't usually
write to forums discussing HTML.

Yucca, http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/

Received on Saturday, 27 December 1997 05:28:35 UTC