Last night I read the first couple of chapters in Tim Berners-Lee's
autobiography. First observation, I wish, when he was looking for a
hypertext company to work with in the late 80s, he had talked to me!
-- yeah, then you could have had your flap about annotations a la
Third Voice all of TEN YEARS AGO. And the web would be Mac-only
and require Appletalk. Big wins there.
Wow. I'd like to meet him someday and show him how our outliners
work. His writing makes me want to deeply integrate outlining and
the web.
-- Winer's got a point about the need for outlining in browsers.
If you want to encourage structural markup, you need to have
features that actually exploit that structural markup. If you think
long documents are a good idea (as everyone bar Jakob does) make them
collapsible and manageable.
You can do a collapsible outline in javascript with
conditionally-written comments, but it's such a hack - far uglier
than, oh, the implementation of CSS on top of javascript with
Netscape.
L.
<L.Wood@surrey.ac.uk>PGP<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/>