Re: Portrait vs. Landscape (was Re: THEAD & TFOOT for colum

> Difficult to know what to do with it when your document model is
> pageless and the user controls the window geometry. I guess you could
> put it between columns in MULTICOL, though..

It would go between columns, and other horizontal displays.  The only 
reason <HR> makes any sense is because we are scrolling downwards, 
not to the right.
 
> I don't know any document model that prohibits it. Can you explain
> more what a "horizontal representation" is? Do you mean typesetting
> at 90 degrees?

A horizontal representation is one such as:

L L L L L L
i i i i i i
n n n n n n
e e e e e e

O T T F F S
n w h o i i
e o r u v x
    e r
    e


My document would continue to go towards the right as I add more 
lines.  Certain eastern languages do this vertical rendering of 
sentences if I'm not mistaken.  Additionally certain formulas, 
accounting records, charts, etc... all have this presentation that 
goes across rather than down.
 
> Such as?

The box model is clearly shown to have a content below previous 
content approach.  There is no support for content beside content, 
and no properties that would allow you to specify that as the case.  

> Top or bottom of _what_? The window? The screen? The pane? The frame?
> Or the printed page?

Can one not ask the same question of Left or Right.  If my document 
is 100 times as wide as it is high then floating something to the 
left or right seems kind ofpointless, yet floating something at the 
top or bottom has merit.
 
> This does seem to be true, but printing was never a requirement: the
> Web was designed as a terminal-based online medium. If you want to
> take the information out of that and put it in a page-based medium,
> you need a different document model, like TeX or PDF..

HTML from SGML was designed for medium independant display of 
infomration.  The introduction of the print extensions for CSS would 
certainly help this case.

There are things that are missing to support columnar 
and/or paged layout:
-page breaks (which I notice are in the print extensions)
-orphan control / keeping together content to prevent parts of a 
section from being on different columns/pages
__
| Mortar: Advanced Web Development <http://bigpic.com/mortar/>
| Neil St.Laurent  neil@bigpic.com
| Big Picture Multimedia

Received on Sunday, 17 August 1997 17:05:38 UTC