Re: Thoughts on a new charter for HTML

For columnar text we need a container. The existing BODY or DIV
elements would work fine for this purpose. There is also interest in
flowing text from one area to another.  The style sheet can define
the areas and how text should flow into them, so there is no
additional burden on HTML. 

I notice that pretty much every wysiwyg document editor supports
bold and italic buttons on the toolbar. I think we will have a hard
time of it convincing users that <B> and <I> should be dropped. The
accessibility argument doesn't apply to these elements, since its
easy to apply styles for aural browsing etc. as has been so ably
demonstrated by T.V. Raman. I don't see how generating <EM> for the
Italic button and <STRONG> for the bold button changes things.

At the workshop, I very much appreciated the sentiment that forms
should be more declarative, with a strong separation of structure
from presentation. This would seem to place the burden on CSS to
cover form fields in a future revision, e.g. the choice of
rendering for a range input field as a slider, spin control or dial.

The tough issue for me is how do deal with tabular information.
One idea is to treat tables as presentation markup. Provided
authors express the data model directly, you can then use style
sheets to map the data into tables for windows browsers and
nested lists (for example) for browsers that have small displays.
CSS2 includes the support needed to map a <P> element (say)
into a table cell, but lacks flexibility. A scriptable style
sheet using as Spice or XSL is easily powerful enough though.

This sounds good, until you realise that most users won't get it.
I believe that most users think of tables as a presentation device
and are very happy to author that way. How do we convince them to
take the extra trouble to express their data declaratively? How
would you map Excel spreadsheet data to a form that works well for
cell phones?

I will leave my other thoughts to further messages.

Regards,

-- Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett
phone: +44 122 578 2984 (or 2521) +44 385 320 444 (gsm mobile)
World Wide Web Consortium (on assignment from HP Labs)

Received on Thursday, 21 May 1998 10:23:59 UTC