Re: Client-side highlighting; tag proposal
Gavin Nicol (gtn@ebt.com)
Sat, 11 Mar 1995 04:02:41 +0500
>Second, Lee Shombert claimed that there was no simple expression that
>could be expressed in the header for client interpretation to indicate
>which words, phrases, paragraphs or images should be highlighted.
>He's right that simple schemes won't work (e.g. just listing "data"
>and "actor" would fail because the client would not limit highlighting
>to terms in the same para.) but more complicated schemes are possible
>(e.g. a set of ranges as byte offsets into the marked up document.).
Byte offsets will not work due to
1) Tags (does byte offset include them or not)
2) Whitespace (for which SGML has lovely parsing rules ;-))
The functionality is needed very much. Perhaps we could have something
like:
<MARK TYPE=HIGHLIGHT START=123 END=333>
Where TYPE would indicate the role, and START and END represent word
offsets in the document, though this might well be more complicated
to handle than paired tags (though safer in terms of content model).
Ideas? The above does not feel good to me, and neither do PI's or
paired tags.