Re: Design aims of XHTML 2.0

David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk> writes:

> [ for MS Word ]
> > semantics -- a style is (almost) nothing more than an arbitrary group of
> > presentational attributes.
> 
> But even then, very few people use styles.

Except from that MS Word often "uses styles for them", guessing (most of
the time terribly wrong) which style a user actually wants based on
which presentation he/she is applying to a text fragment (or maybe based
on Bill Gates' mood that day, or the phase of the moon, or something
completely different. Who knows?).

> They use bold from the tool bar.

Yup. But, when the format contains no such thing as an "emphasize"
element, what should one do?

> They hit return twice rather than defining a paragraph style
> with extra space between paragraphs.  They use hard page breaks rather
> than using "keep with next" and "keep together".  They style headings
> directly, so there is no valid outline.

Exactly. Seen it all. People even learn it from books, courses and at
school. I think it is quite important to try to make all those things
teach people about real text authoring and semantics, instead of just
fiddling with fonts and colors in MS Word or similar. Things will never
improve if everyone keep being learned the Wrong Things from everywhere.

> > And the elements in the text must also be shown in a clear and
> > unambiguous way. My idea of how to do this, is to show some sort of
> 
> No-one has mentioned W3C's own Amaya editor/browser, which has the
> generation of structured [X]HTML as an aim.  It's solution for identifying
> elements is to provide an alternative view, giving the document tree.

Ok, but why not show (exactly) where elements begin and end in the
editing pane too?

-- 
Øystein Skartsæterhagen

Received on Monday, 3 November 2003 18:40:17 UTC