19 Jun 1995 - Preliminary Information

Supported and Unsupported HTML

SpHyDir II was restructured to simplify extensions. Most of the HTML 3.0 and Netscape tags and attributes are now supported, or will be shortly.

SpHyDir generates LINK tags for Subdocument relationships (Next, Previous, Up). It preserves, as properties of the Document Object, LINKs mentioned in the current HTML 3.0 draft (Home, TOC, Index, Glossary, Copyright, Help, and Bookmark). It plans to support Header and Trailer links for document specific boilerplate files. Other LINK tags are not preserved.

The SpHyDir objects have a place for every valid construction, but they may not support constructions that are invalid, even when frequenlty used. If there is a reasonable strategy, current incorrect markup may be "upgraded" to valid status. For example, lists may not contain any data outside the list items:
<OL>Text here is illegal, but there is a lot of it in practice.
<LI>This is an implied paragraph
<LI><P>This is an explicit paragraph</P></LI>
Text here is nominally illegal.
</OL>
SpHyDir will take one text string outside the points and "upgrade" it to the HTML 3.0 List Header <LH> contents. In other places, loose text may be upgraded to a <CAPTION> or <CREDIT>. However, when there is no place to put it, the text may get lost.

SpHyDir needs where possible to convert HTML constructs to the properties of an Object. A particular problem is created by hypertext labels generated by <A NAME=xxx>word</A>. Since SpHyDir cannot manage properties for individual words, it assigns the NAME to the ID property of the Paragraph, Section, or other object in which the labelled word appears. It is the intention of SpHyDir to migrate this to the preferred <P ID=xxx> syntax of HTML 3.0 as soon as that syntax is universally supported. For now, SpHyDir rewrites the HTML by applying the <A NAME=xxx> tag to the entire text content of the Paragraph or Header in which it previously appeared. SpHyDir does not support two <A NAME=xxx> labels within the same paragraph or header.

In many visual programming languages, buttons and boxes have a caption. This is not an HTML concept. SpHyDir follows the more common practice to simplify use. In HTML, a check box is just the box:
<INPUT TYPE="CHECKBOX" NAME="BIN"> BINARY
Syntatically, the last word "BINARY" is outsize the tag. It is just text. If SpHyDir didn't make any stuctural assumptions, it would just appear as ordinary paragraph text. However, SpHyDir depends on creating "objects" that are bigger than just a "[]" or "O". So the Entry field, Checkbox, and Radiobutton forms object include text that functions as the "caption" of the object.

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This document generated by SpHyDir, another fine product of PC Lube and Tune.