Frames and tables of contents

R J Partington (rjp@heffer.demon.co.uk)
Sun, 22 Oct 1995 13:10:37 +0100 (BST)

I've been thinking about the Frames extensions recently implemented
by Netscape, and while some of the ideas seem to be good, couldn't
they have been implemented using 'straight' HTML and a well-written
browser?

Take the 'table of contents' idea, where you have a permanent frame
showing you the table of contents at a site for easy navigation. It
occured to me yesterday (after I noticed there was a <menu> tag --
only took me a year :) that a 'smart' browser could take this
information from a page it's just parsed and display a table of
contents from that. Then it could update the table with submenus as
further pages where visited.

As for the 'banner' idea, couldn't that have been implemented by an
attribute 'locked'? So for a fixed picture at the top of the page,

<img src="wibble.gif" alt="[wibble ltd. logo]" locked=top>

which doesn't break existing browsers, and gives you a similar
functionality. This could apply to paragraphs, menus (giving you the
table of contents as well), anything sensible really. This method is
also more 'correct' as being fixed in position is an attribute of an
object, not something 'above' the object.

WRT the <menu> thing, are any people who are writing browsers
considering such an 'enhancement'?

Rob

Feel free to flame me if I'm not making sense. I've just wrestled
with a serial cable for an hour trying to get two computers talking.
:(

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