Re: <PAGE> proposal

BearHeart / Bill Weinman (BearHeart@bearnet.com)
Fri, 22 Dec 1995 18:52:31 -0600


>The pointless kludge may in fact be an answer, a Mike Meyer surmised.
>Consider <DIV CLASS="Paged">...</DIV>. The semantics of the "paged" CLASS
>is that only one DIV is considered "viewable" at any time, i.e. as long
>as some part of a DIV is "visible", no other DIV segment should be.

The reason I call <DIV> a pointless kluge (I looked up the spelling
in the Jargon file--boy am I embarassed!) is that it's only reason for
existance seems to be to patch up the deficient behavior of other tags.

There's no functional difference between, say . . .

(this is the example of <div> from the html3 docs at w3.org)

<DIV CLASS=Abstract> <P>text </DIV>

and

<P CLASS=Abstract> text </P>

or

<DIV ALIGN=RIGHT><IMG SRC="foo.gif"></DIV>

and

<IMG SRC="foo.gif" ALIGN=RIGHT>

The only reason I can see for <DIV>'s existance is to do stuff
like: <DIV CLEAR=LEFT><IMG SRC="foo.gif"></DIV> since there's no
"clear" attribute in <IMG>. It seems to me that it would make a
lot more sense to fix the broken tags then to add a kluge.

Why can't <IMG> have a "clear" attribute? (then Netscape wouldn't
have had to kluge the ALIGN attribute!) Why can't people learn to use
<P> as a container (besides the fact that many browsers still don't
implement it right <g>)?

So if you think the CLASS attribute would work for this, that's
fine . . . but why not have a <PAGE> tag for it, instead of further
patching a kluge to fix another deficiency in the definition.

+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
* BearHeart / Bill Weinman
* BearHeart@bearnet.com * * http://www.bearnet.com/ *
* Author of The CGI Book: * http://www.bearnet.com/cgibook/ *
* 'Tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers. --Shakespeare