- From: Lars Hansen <lars.hansen@yahoo.co.uk>
- Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2010 05:42:29 +0100
- To: public-html-comments@w3.org
Hello, it's nice to see an attempt at a new revision of HTML with some easy-making tags for todays webpage designs. But is this enough? Here a pithy paper: It's time to do away with HTML Most people using the Internet today access some web resource for whatever they want to do and they conduct their interaction with web resources by browsing webpages. Webpages are they main experience on the Internet. Thus webpages have the main attention of people wanting to bring quality to other people. For webpage design HTML is currently used. And this is a mess. A by now huge standard and additions to implement with many miniscule unobvious details and webpage renderers with many faults have lead to headaches everywhere (people developing the renderers a.k.a. browsers, people designing the webpages, people viewing the pages). Webpage design suffers from HTML being a text content description language. Some problems: For text to display, a p tag is necessary. This implies the text being a paragraph which is not always the case, more later. The paragraph as then rendered by browsers has no defined position: its position from a corner, let it be the top left one, is browser dependent. (As tested with Internet Explorer 7 and Opera 9.5). The p tag would be fine to relay information that the text is a paragraph but it is not suited for the thing people conduct their interaction with when accessing web resources. A layout and positioning language is needed. Here is one: let there be pure boxes only: define their position from any corner of the parent box absolutely or relatively. Define their size absolutely or relatively to the parents box size. Allow rounded elliptical corners. Give the boxes a resource definer (flat color, image, text file, video, web page) to have that resource be fetched and displayed inside (without margins). Define opaque or transparent background for the box. This way every layout of today is possible in an easy to design manner and with a homogene display across browsers as it is easy to implement. For text allow fonts (to be downloaded from the server the page is on) and utilize a simple character styling language including definition of line division sizes. Language details for dynamic contents like menus is still needed though an onhover definer may be enough. I can write this down a bit more formal if you agree that HTML is outdated (by no deadline though). Thanks and kind regards Lars Hansen
Received on Friday, 22 January 2010 15:42:31 UTC