Re: Building Documents from Components

Earl Hood (ehood@imagine.convex.com)
Fri, 02 Dec 1994 15:15:07 -0600

> I wish I could do that with parts that are not images. Suppose there were
> tags like <HTML SRC=url...> and <TEXT SRC=url...> that would let me insert
> other kinds of parts into the pages I present.
>
> I have lots of little building blocks, some of which are dynamic, which I
> would like concatenate in different ways for different sorts of
> presentations. Making pages by manually re-concatenating the components is
> a waste of time and space. A page with a list of links to the components
> is as unsatisfactory as a link to a gif instead of an inline image. Since
> some of the parts are on different servers, I can't even write a CGI script
> to do the concatenation.
>
> What do you think is the right solution?

SUBDOC support. SGML already has the ability to support what you
want. I never expected SUBDOC support to be included into
HTML 2.0 since it is not standard practice of HTML-based software.
However, I'd like to see it in HTML 3.0. Unfortunately, the
current HTML 3 declaration does not turn on SUBDOC support.
Can this be changed? Dave?

One of the things I like about sub-documents, is that they are a
complete SGML document. I.e. They can have their own declaration and
DTD, or in a more simplier/HTML case, they will have their own HEAD and
BODY data.

I made a suggestion on how SUBDOC could work in HTML and WWW clients,
but interest in SUBDOC died out quickly. Check out
<URL:http://gummo.stanford.edu/html/hypermail/www-talk-1994q3/0566.html>
and other messages in the thread.

--ewh