Subject: Re: Formatting Objects considered harmful From: Guy_Murphy@xxxxxxxxxx Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 11:01:17 +0100 |
Hi. Lets take a look at what we'll be loosing in loosing HTML.... We'll loose a handful of Hn tags, that are very rarely used correctly on the majority of Web sites out there. We'll loose a P tag, that might be a shame and is the only tag I think might be missed. But incrasingly the DIV is being used in it's place. We'll loose ADDRESS, CITE, BLOCKQUOTE etc etc..... take a surf around the Net and take a look at how many sites use these tags... precious few. And I could go on. My point however is that if your concern is abuse, HTML *is* heavily abused, resulting in a semantic mess. Why is HTML abused? I would argue because it does not address the needs of authors, and so they are adopting a working practice that suits their needs, in many cases a presentational orientated practice, rather than document-centric one. You see HTML splits in two. One half addresses directly presentation, and cannot be seen to add structural semantics to a document useful for anything other than formatting. The other half gives semantics for a very simply "academic" style document, due to the evolution of HTML and it's origins....Why do you insist on foisting this semantic on the rest of the Web? It is wholy inappropriate for maybe 90+% of websites out there. The reason why people are not using HTML semantics correctly is because they aren't producing accademic documents in the main. they are producing Web sites on Quake, or fishing, or their online romances. What these people are concened with is how their site is presented, which is why presentation semantics are appropriate to their needs. In this way we might actualy start seeing documents with some degree of semantic predictability. As a side issue, it is worth noting that in using XSL for XML documents in IE5 on the client-side, one does not loose the original semantics, because on viewing source one gets a view of the original XML document.... what is lost? Where transformation takes place on the server one will always loose the original data semantics whether using ASP, PHP or whatever. As another side note, I spent some time with two colloeagues writting a Web crawler for a categorisation engine, neither of which are HTML users, but simply have to start parsign HTML documents on the Web. They are lamenting the absolute mess and completely ununiform, inconsistent and downright wrong usage that is the current state of HTML on the Web. Please, can we move on quickly and pretend that HTML never happened? Cheers Guy. xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx on 04/25/99 10:52:00 PM To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx cc: (bcc: Guy Murphy/UK/MAID) Subject: Re: Formatting Objects considered harmful [SNIP] > CSS+HTML has just as much potential for abuse as XSL FOs. Any > stylesheet language that provides an inline style mechanism has the > potential for abuse: it allows you to use inline style instead of > semantically meaningful markup. In theory, yes. However, when using HTML you always have the possibility of doing the right thing. Normally, a SPAN element comes in between more abstract elements and is only used for the odd visual effect. Fairly harmless. If you use FO as a document format, you only have a formatting vocabulary at your disposal and your objects are bound to a certain media type. -h&kon H?kon Wium Lie http://www.operasoftware.com/people/howcome howcome@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx simply a better browser XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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