Re: ALIAS tag?

At 4:38 AM 4/24/98, David Suarez de Lis wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>I have been thinking that many of the new tags we could add to the HTML4
>DTD can be managed by using class and/or rel attributes which most tags
>now support.
>
>I think it would be nice an ALIAS tag which would allow us to simplify
>writing and which UA's would expand on the fly when display the documents.
>
><alias name="Juan" content="div class='juan'">
>
><Juan>Hey, <span lang="es">Pedro</span>, how you doing?</Juan>

>This method could provide powerful structural markup to HTML documents
>without the need of modifying the DTD, also allowing full use of Style
>Sheets instead of hardwired style markup.

This capability is in essence covered by Cascading Style Sheets, even in
CSS1, through the Display property:

   Juan { Display: Block }

The rule tells the browser that "Juan" is a block-element, which is
equivalent to a DIV.

The functionality you requested is already implemented in the "XPublish"
XML web publishing application for Macintosh. XPublish use the display
property to allow a Cascading Style Sheet to define how XML should be
processed into HTML. Documents can be authored using for example <Juan>
elements, which are converted into <DIV CLASS="Juan"> HTML markup at
publishing time based on the setting of the Display property in an
associated CSS style sheet.

Next generation browsers will do the same at rendering time. However, it
will probably take quite some time before these browsers are used by the
majority, making conversion from custom XML tags to standard HTML at
publishing time a viable solution for a while.


-- Terje <Terje@in-progress.com> | Media Design in*Progress

   C a s c a d e... a comprehensive Cascading Style Sheets editor for Mac
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Received on Friday, 24 April 1998 06:31:45 UTC