Re: Generalizing Banners

From: Lou Montulli <montulli@mozilla.com>
Date: Sun, 20 Aug 95 19:51:17 EDT 
In article <9508200854.ZM4023@dmg.west.ora.com> "Terry Allen" <terry@ora.com>
wrote:
> 
> Dan cited the prose; here's the content model (and Lou, you really
> ought to start glancing at the DTD you cite):
>   

See: <LINK REL=Banner HREF=banner.html>
for the banner functionality I described.

> <!ELEMENT BANNER - - %body.content>
> <!ATTLIST BANNER %attrs; >
> 
> You can't get another document in there.
> 
> And before we go any further along the path of IMG we need to deal
> with the thorny issues raised by automatically including one piece
> of data in another.  I call that "involuntary transclusion."
> 

I can see by the responses that I am receiving that I didn't
give a very good description of the functionality I envision.

This is not really about document inclusion or page layout it's
about creating relationships between existing documents to create
entirely new and powerful navigation paradigms.

Let me give you a more specific example.  Imagine a compound document
composed like this:

|-------------------|
|    |              |
|Img1|  Text        |
|Img2|  Viewing     |
|Img3|  Area        |
|Img4|              |
|Img5|              |
|Img6|              |
|Img7|              |
|-------------------|

Imagine clicking on Img1 and having information appear about that
image (or the subject of that image) in the Text viewing area.
The Left window remains the same while the right one changes.
Now click on Img2 and the right screen changes again to show
different information.  Previously in HTML you would have
to reload an entirely new document with all the images and
everything to get this functionality.

Imagine something like this:

|-------------------|
|   Search form     |
|-------------------|
|                   |
|                   |
|   Results         |
|                   |
|-------------------|

The top window allows the user to enter search terms while
the bottom window displays the results.  You can enter
as many searches as you like without ever having to leave
the original search page.

Now lets get more complicated.

|-------------------|
| Cell 1 | Cell 2   |
|-------------------|
|                   |
|                   |
|   Cell 3          |
|                   |
|-------------------|

In cell one is a list of species, when you select a species a
list of animals within the species appears in Cell 2.  When you
select an animal, information and pictures about the animal 
appear in cell 3.  The user can easily navigate between 
species and animals without the pain of switching lots of screens, etc.

:lou
-- 
Lou Montulli                 http://www.mcom.com/people/montulli/
       Netscape Communications Corp.

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