- From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com>
- Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2007 10:47:46 +0100
- To: public-html@w3.org
Ease of use is a crucial goal, but I doubt HTML suitable for writing everything from documents to web applications ever has been or ever will be suitable for mass, still less universal, hand authoring. Reintroducing presentational elements would (at best) introduce further layer of indirection between what people mean and their HTML. The problem is not that presentational markup is necessarily non-interoperable, but that it is deeply ambiguous. Screen readers and voice browsers, for example, would either need to ignore indent (risking communication failure) or report it every time in case it was being used with special purpose, slowing down reading time and forcing the user to guess what it might mean in any given instance. One could make HTML a little more suitable for widespread hand authoring by removing the requirement to encode ampersands, forcing use of a unicode character set where entities would be unnecessary except to escape HTML markup, and separating out a kernel of semantic markup used for basic communication (e.g. a, quote, p, br, em, ul, ol, li, abbr, section, heading, img, video, table, tr, th, td, and span for changes of language). Adding indent, i, b, font, and friends would dramatically complicate that subset while reducing its ability to communicate across the board. We do have a way of encoding information that is usable for mass hand authoring: it's called text/plain and many authors already use it for blog comments. It's also trivial to produce a client that word-wraps automatically and follows URIs in plain text: most email clients do this already. If formatting HTML is difficult, effective responses would be: 1) To improve CSS's usability. I think the usability problems of CSS relate primarily to page layout not text formatting though. 2) To encourage authors to rely on browsers' default presentation. 3) To improve browsers' default presentation (e.g. by increasing line-height to say 1.5 improve legibility). The more limited benefit adduced to including presentational elements is to allow authors who do not control the presentation of host documents to force a useful presentation in the sections they author. This sounds like it should be mentioned to the authors and possibly reported as a bug with the default CSS and documentation for the CMS in question. Many CMS require input by hand authoring because we haven't devised effective tools for expressing what people mean rather than how people want to format their text. Many other systems use would-be WYSIWIG GUIs, presumably because their creators don't agree that hand authoring is easier than using tools. With regard to how robots can treat blockquote currently, any blockquote with the cite attribute is highly unlikely to be misused for indentation. So rather than introducing indent we should encourage providing citations for quotations. -- Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
Received on Saturday, 14 April 2007 10:17:13 UTC