Re: <PRELOAD> in <HEAD> section, MOUSEOVER attribute in <A> tag

Steve Nichols wrote:
> 
> JavaScript's mouseOver effect and the A:Hover effect of Cascading Style
> Sheets have become so commonplace that I feel they deserve their own HTML
> tags and parameters. This would eliminate unnecessary JavaScripting and
> save web designers a lot of hassle. In order to achieve this, I propose the
> following plan:
> 
> The first thing that must be addressed is JavaScript's ability to pre-load
> images into the user's cache. This feature must be implemented in HTML in
> order to achieve the same effect. For this, I propose a tag known as
> <PRELOAD> which would be placed within the <HEAD>...</HEAD> section. The
> tag would contain the URLs of each image that are to be stored using a
> comma as the list separator. The code would look as follows:
> 
> <PRELOAD img1="/imgs/img1.jpg", img2="/imgs/img2.jpg", img3="imgs/img3.jpg">
>         img1, img2 and img3 would all be used as references in the MOUSEOVER
> attribute later on.

Forgive my ignorance, but couldn't the same effect be achieved without
any extensions to HTML by exploiting the <LINK> tag to achieve this
effect?  <LINK> is specified (in HTML 4.0, at least) to accept a
pre-defined but extensible list of link types; by recommending that
browsers honour a link type of (say "CACHE""), one could have
a pre-cache link of the form

	<LINK REL="CACHE" HREF=uri>

where "uri" is the URI of the image to be pre-cached, or (more
powerfully)

	<LINK REL="CACHE" HREF=uri>

where "uri" is the URI of an HTML page which contains nothing
(apart from the syntactic essentials) other than a series of
<IMG> tags for the images to be pre-cached.

-- 
Philip TAYLOR
Webmaster, Information Services
Royal Holloway & Bedford New College
Tel:   +44 (0)1784 443172 (Office/answer'phone)
Tel:   +44 (0)7970 443172 (Orange/answer'phone)
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Mailto:P.Taylor@Rhbnc.Ac.Uk

Received on Wednesday, 6 December 2000 06:47:03 UTC