marked sections (was navigability)

Lou Burnard (lou@vax.ox.ac.uk)
Tue, 07 Jun 1994 17:35:29 +0100


Dave Raggett wrote:

>I think we ought to bite the bullet and support SGML's marked sections.
>This allow you to switch on/off sections of a document with simple entity
>declarations that can be set in the <!DOCTYPE> declaration or set by
...

to which GTN wrote:

>While these are nice to have, they are not entirely needed. Much the
>same effect can be achieved using different stylesheets. In one
>stylesheet, one can say "any text enclosed by this element should be
>hidden" and in another, one can say "any text enclosed by this element
>should be rendered in italics".

But this would require you to define a structure in which ALL of the
elements you might possibly want to switch on/off can coexist. This is
simply not possible for many real documents.

Marked sections are a boon because they allow you to encode alternatives
which you know cannot co-exist in the same document structure.

LB