Re: LINKs

Bob Stayton (bobs@sco.com)
Tue, 10 Aug 93 14:08:35 PDT


> From: Tony Sanders <sanders@bsdi.com>

> > Well, everyone wants something different.
> >
> > What we want to be able to do is have information in the HTML header
> > that indicates the structural aspects of an HTML document relative to
> > some larger whole, e.g. pages w/in an article, w/in an issue, w/in a
> > volume w/in a journal.
>
> What you want are <LINK>'s which are defined in HTML but no one implements
> them so I guess no one really wants to use them very badly :-)

We want them very badly. Do we have a chicken and egg
problem here? LINKs aren't implemented in browsers because
they don't appear in the files, and they don't appear in
the files because they aren't implemented? How do we get
them?

We plan to put a lot of structured documentation online.
For reasons of performance and usability, we need to chunk
it out into topics along heading boundaries. Currently I
have to generate HREFs at the end of each topic to indicate
how it fits into the structure (next, previous, children,
parent). That is clunky but usable for navigation, but it
doesn't help for printing when someone wants to print out a
whole chapter by starting at a point in the hierarchy. If
a browser could follow the LINKs downward and in sequence,
a user could specify to print a whole chapter. It appears
that this is exactly what the LINK mechanism was designed
to do, but it doesn't seem to be supported.

bobs
Bob Stayton 425 Encinal Street
Technical Publications Santa Cruz, CA 95060
The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. (408) 425-7222
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