Re: Popup windows & style sheets

On Tue, 19 Mar 1996, Bert Bos wrote:

> This is a visual-only style.
> 
> Hopefully the same style sheet contains separate rules for aural
> renderings as well. Maybe render:on-demand could be the equivalent of
> a popup, effectively causing the element to be skipped on initial
> reading and turning it into something very much like a hyperlink.
> 
>   FN.short { sound-before: tinkerbell.au; sound-after: gong.au }
>   FN.long { sound-before: tinkerbell.au; render: on-demand }
>   A { sound-during: drums.au } /* normal links */
>   A.dict { sound-during: none; sound-before: beep.au } /* pop-up links */
> 
> If there is no such style sheet, you just ignore the visual
> styles.
> 
> I'm not so sure about trying to use the visual properties as
> multi-modal ones. It's not clear to me that there is a
> context-independent translation from screen-oriented properties to
> other media, even other visual ones.

That's right, you shouldn't "use the visual properties as multi-modal 
ones", you should think about what the visual property is supposed to 
express and develop that into a multi-modal cue.  Popup windows are a good 
example of a visual cue that can't be represented multi-modally (for some 
properties that can, see 
http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/WWW/seibert/style/mms.html).

The underlying idea of a popup is that the new window is spatially 
separated from the old, but the old window is still present.  Separating 
the windows so that both can be viewed simultaneously works well for 
visual browsers, but can't be done with a simple audio browser because 
you only have one dimension (time) to work with.  Perhaps you could do it 
in a sophisticated browser with spatial audio resolution (see 
http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/WWW/seibert/style/raman.html), but then the 
listener would have to follow two tracks at once rather than skipping 
back and forth, which he could do just as easily without having a popup 
feature.  The easiest way to deal with a popup window for non-visual 
browsers is to just make it into a standard hyperlink.

David Seibert

Work: seibert@hep.physics.mcgill.ca         Home: 6420 36th Ave.
Physics Department, McGill University       Montreal, PQ, H1T 2Z5 
3600 Univ. St., Mtl., PQ, H3A 2T8, Canada   Canada
(514) 398-6496; FAX: (514) 398-3733         (514) 255-5965

Received on Tuesday, 19 March 1996 09:49:34 UTC