Re: Encoding of site structure ...

> - When making a navigation bar from link elements,
> only those pages that are linked to directly from the
> displayed page are accessible. Displaying a complete
> navigation tree is impossible.

Incidentally, I missed one significant point here.  As far as the 
Internet Explorer family is concerned, there is already such a format,
Channel Definition Files, in XML.  I think that Netscape 4 had something
similar, but incompatible.  This is probably still supported by the
IE series, but died a death in that:

- it was marketed in terms of "push" feeds, i.e. as part of a business
model in which you paid the browser supplier to include you in their
catalogue of channels, and once a user subscribed to a channel, the browser
could automatically refresh a local copy of the whole compound document
on a periodic basis (although you could have the navigation without the
refreshing, or the offline logging and returning of click trails);  the
business model didn't work, and hardly anyone realised that you could use
the technology without that model;

- HTML compound document developers are very reluctant to create more
than one type of file (e.g. preferring meta elements to real HTTP (even
when the real HTTP is needed for it to work) and including scripting
and styles inline or in tag).

This was based on a collapsing tree model.

Received on Saturday, 8 March 2003 15:29:22 UTC