(no subject)

Jim McBeath (redback!jimmc@eskimo.com)
Tue, 1 Feb 94 09:47:16 PST

> 1. LINKS:
> The proposed attributes NEXT, PREV, and PARENT seem like a good idea.
> I have a suggestion to make these more flexible.
>
> Problem: The proposed attributes don't work with page sharing. If you
> write a linked document and insert meaningful NEXT fields, I can't re-use
> one of your pages (without copying it manually), because I want a different
> NEXT pointer. This problem also surfaces when authors want to put multiple
> organizations on the pages of a document, e.g. cronological or by subject.
>
> Solution: To allow page sharing, let the *parent* document specify a *list*
> of links, then NEXT and PREV depend on how you got to that document. The
> list can simply be formed from all the hyperlinks in the parent document,
> i.e. we don't need a new HTML mechanism. But we might want a new mechanism
> to 1) encourage browsers to implement this, and 2) let authors have
> incidental links that are not part of the sequence of pages.
> (Perhaps the parent could even specify a *tree* of links, to override
> deeper levels in the document tree. Dubious.)

Dave Raggett and I came up with a proposal for a mechanism we called PATHs
which deals with this issue in much the way you suggest. It is based on adding
two new link values to the REL attribute: Node and Path. This proposal was
posted to www-talk on January 10 (with "Subdocument" used instead of "Node"
in that posting).

You can access that posting from the stanford www-talk archives at

http://gummo.stanford.edu/html/hypermail/www-talk-1994q1.messages/125.html

There seemed to be little disagreement about the proposal. I believe Dave
was planning on adding it to the HTML+ spec.

-Jim McBeath
jimmc@eskimo.com