Re: <head><body><footer>

On Fri, 11 Dec 1998, Wuming  Z H A N G wrote:

> I DO not think the now HTML is finnished at write <head></head> and
> <body></body>

The BODY element contains the whole content of a document, with
"content" understood as 'data, excluding metadata'. 

> I guess someone should like <footer>"this page created at 1998 12
> 11"</footer> at the bottom of the page or some another things... I
> wonder... what you think?!

There is little reason why the overall structure of HTML documents
should be changed, so a FOOTER element, if adopted, should definitely
be included into a BODY element.

I don't see any particular reason to include a FOOTER element. If the 
idea is that the content of such an element should appear as fixed
(not affected by vertical scrolling) at the bottom of a document window,
it would be just a special case of a more general, widely discussed
and argued idea (which bears some resemblance to frames). Apart from
that, information about things like last update can be included
without any specific markup. Or one might precede it with something like
<HR TITLE="Information about this document">
as I tend to do. What _might_ be useful is a well-defined method for
presenting the date of last update to the content (as opposite to the
the date of last write in the technical sense, which might involve e.g.
just restoring a backup copy or fixing a minor typo) in a well-defined
format which could be read e.g. by search engines. Naturally, one
should then use some standard, unambiguous date notation. And it
would be basically metadata, wouldn't it?

Yucca, http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/ or http://yucca.hut.fi/yucca.html

Received on Friday, 11 December 1998 05:17:06 UTC