- From: Håkon Wium Lie <howcome@opera.com>
- Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 09:16:14 +0200
- To: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Cc: www-tag@w3.org, www-style@w3.org
Also sprach Elliotte Rusty Harold:
> HTML is extremely limited. It
> can tell you that you're looking at paragraphs, headings, tables, a
> few other things. That's it. XML can do all that and far more.
It's the other way around. HTML can do everything XML can do and more...
> All HTML tells you is that something is a paragraph, a level 1
> heading, a table, monospaced, preformatted, and a few other things.
> <SINGER>Madonna</SINGER> is more semantic than <SPAN>Madonna</SPAN>.
You can combine the two:
<span class="singer">Madonna</span>
which preserves your semantic, while still using HTML and staying
compatible with hundreds of millions of browsers. Using the CLASS
attribute you can tranform any XML markup into HTML without losing
information.
I'm not advocating dropping XML and using only HTML. There are
certainly use cases for XML. But in the domain of documents, I think
developments should build on HTML and use the CLASS attribute for more
specific semantics of your own liking.
-h&kon
Håkon Wium Lie cto °þe®ª
howcome@opera.com http://people.opera.com/howcome
Received on Tuesday, 20 August 2002 03:28:15 UTC