Message-Id: <firstname.lastname@example.org> Date: Tue, 20 Feb 1996 12:15:39 -0500 To: email@example.com From: Erik Aronesty <firstname.lastname@example.org> Subject: Re: printable documents At 01:24 AM 2/19/96 -0500, you wrote: >In message <email@example.com>, Erik Aronesty writes >: >>Some docuemnts are intended to be printed in landscape, other in protrait. >>Some are intended to be tiled, other are intended to be scaled to fit. >>I think that it would be proper to define these intentions in a document. >>I also feel it should be easy for an author to express these intentions. > >Yes... but is HTML the right medium for this? Why not postscript? HTML defines no way for specifiying alternate documents or formats. Thuss, a document which must be printed, viewed on a browser that has no image support and viewed on a browser with no java support requires a hideous mish-mosh of alt tags links to alternate files and server side scripts. >An Evaluation of the World Wide Web >as a Platform for Electronic >Commerce > >Daniel W. Connolly >W3C/MIT LCS >$Date: 1995/12/23 03:32:39 $ >http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Collaboration/ECommerceEval To quote you... "the tools for composing mixed object documents are primitive, and many features of a comprehensive compound document architecture are lacking" The ALT tag is the best/worst example of a PATCH to this core problem in HTML. In order to progress as a document standard, we need to be able to specify multiple overlapping contexts for the entire and/or any section of a document. As I see it...from reading this document, two major features are required in HTML: 1. Client-side conditional document source location 2. Defining multiple regions/sections within a document Again...quoting your document "One facility that is notably lacking from Web" implementations is transclusion -- the ability to include one text object inside another by reference. For example, to include an excerpt of one document inside another, or to build a document out of section and subsection objects. " *Breaking a document into sections* is essential for document management and usability. What he failed to add was that these sections and/or transclusions must be *contextual*, in fact their very necessity implies that context is the driving force behind them. Until now, context is *implied* in HTML and browsers must *interpret* these contexts according to some sort of perverse nonstandard logic. What is needed is a method for adding contexts and standardizing rendering suggestions for documents.