- From: Shane Thacker <shanethacker@gmail.com>
- Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 11:46:02 -0400
- To: public-html@w3.org
In my experience, novice users tend to use what is available to them for presentation, not semantic meaning. (I'm including people who have been using HTML for a while, but haven't had any particular reason to learn more about it.) Unless you completely rid the browser world of the presentational aspects of HTML markup (as opposed to CSS definitions), such as a double line-break for <p>, it will continue to be used for presentation purposes. That doesn't seem realistic, and as a result I'm sure we can expect to see <p>'s that aren't paragraphs, <blockquote>'s that aren't blockquotes, and <em>'s that aren't really meant to be emphasized, for a long time. That being said, I don't really support the idea of the <indent> tag. HTML may not enforce semantic markup, but it encourages it through those presentation effects, so most of the time <p> really is used for paragraphs, <em> (and <i>) is used for emphasis, and blockquotes...well, blockquotes are interesting. For the past few years the organization I recently worked for used a WYSIWYG editor embedded into a content management system that consistently used <blockquote> for indentation. Worse, it used <blockquote> with an inline style that removed the right-side indentation, because that gave the visual effect the editor's programmers wanted. They could have easily used <div> with an inline style, but they didn't. As a result, our system had quite a few <blockquote>'s that weren't blockquotes, and any users who flipped over to the HTML markup view saw the same practice and internalized it. Is that a problem with HTML and CSS? No, that was a problem with the editor. It should have had a blockquote button that used <blockquote> and an indent button that used <div> with styling. Anyway, I think the aim of this process shouldn't be to add extra top-level presentational elements to muddy the waters further. It may have already been mentioned in this thread, and if so I apologize, but why not use something we already have used: attributes? <indent> might add an extra element, but <p align="indent">, or however would be best to say it, simply adds a presentational suggestion to <p>, a concept that has been in HTML for a long time. We could, of course, use inline CSS styling using the style attribute, but in my experience novice users get concepts like align="some visual location" better than style="some presentation logic that affects visual location". That being said, anyone here used Textile, or BBCode for blog markup or forum posts? I haven't bothered to look and see what kind of HTML is being generated, but I would assume that is different for different engines. Shane
Received on Tuesday, 17 April 2007 13:15:49 UTC