Re: Generalizing Banners

This issue came up as par tof a recent (well, a few months ago)
discussion of REL/REV values and their use with LINK and anchor 
elements.  Roy just posted a summary of some of the more 
interesting parts of this discussion. I believe Murray Maloney 
is writing up a discussion document on these topics.

Some of the items discussed were:

  a) transclusion of content within a document (subdocuments)
  b) simultaneous presentation of related but different
     resources (indexes, search tools, navigational aids, etc.)
  c) simultaneous presentation of equivalent documents.

The second of these would seem easily incorporated as LINK
elements, such as:

<LINK REL="navi-tool"       CLASS="whatever" HREF="url1">
<LINK REL="index-tool"      CLASS="whatever" HREF="url3">
<LINK REL="dictionary-tool" CLASS="whatever" HREF="url4">

These could be initially presented as buttons, that expand
into full-fledged sidebar windows when pressed (given a common
understanding of the rel values, of course). Roy Fielding provided 
a number of mechanisms that might do the job (PRESENT, 
WHEN), and although these versions are rather presentation-
specific this seems to me the right way to go.

However,  there is one thing that is missing -- a data passing
mechanism.  Suppose I want my dictionary tool to look up words 
in a document, such that when I click on arbitrary words in a 
text window, this text passed to the dictionary tool,  which 
looks it up and returns the definition in a popup.   Which
means the browser needs to be told how to encode and send
the data to the server (it can always ignore this if it wants,
and just present the linked resource as a separate document).

I think that if we are going to put complex, active documents 
together, then we want to think about this possibility also.

How about, for simple word searches:

<LINK REL="dictionary-tool" CLASS="whatever" HREF="url4" 
      ENCTYPE="application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
      ENCODING=ISINDEX
      METHOD=GET>

Ian
--
Ian Graham ............................... igraham@hprc.utoronto.ca
Information Commons
University of Toronto