RE: Server Side Magic.

At 03:52, 24/06/01 Tom Worthington wrote:

>Frames and tables in HTML are more of a display format rather than a data 
>abstraction. The table syntax has been enhanced with extra detail to 
>indicate column headings. This introduced a sort of data model for the
table.

>Perhaps we need an slightly more abstract notation to represent the 
>relationship between groups of information. This might be interpreted by 
>browsers as a multiple frames on a large screen or as hypertext links on a 
>small screen.

Yes I agree - adding data models and grouping information would definitely
help. I was interested to see the examples of grouping information in the
W3C WAI Content Authoring Techniques document. For example
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#group-bypass describes how you can
group links together to form objects identifiable as navigation bars. This
is important because whether a device displays such a bar will depend on the
amount of screen real-estate available. 

Pages may also be organised into navigation bars and content using frames.
There are some interesting suggestions about how to avoid frames in the same
document http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#alt-frames (although I must
admit when I tried this I couldn't get it to work due to lack of user agent
conformance - the only browser that seems to support the object tag properly
is IE but IE5 seems to have insufficient CSS support for the example).

Thanks for the WebML reference - I hadn't seen that. 

regards

Mark Butler
HP Labs Bristol

Received on Monday, 25 June 2001 04:57:10 UTC