Re: Cleaning House

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

> Surely 
> the difference between 3<sup>2</sup> and 32 is not just in visual 
> rendering; it's the difference between 9 and 32.

No, it's - at its heart - the problem of using a language that is badly, 
or rather not at all, suited to mark up mathematical or chemical 
equations, It's using a screwdriver to hammer a nail in the wall, and 
complaining that we can't make the handle of the screwdriver in the next 
version smaller because it would make it impossible to hammer nails into 
the wall with it.

> Unfortunately, the discussions seldom go past the point of an incomplete 
> statement of the problem. If such issues where presentation and meaning 
> are intimately coupled cannot be analyzed and solved properly, it is 
> best to allow common presentational markup as currently allowed in HTML, 
> and perhaps add a little. Taking it away without adding fairly complex 
> semantic markup for all the relevant cases would be a disservice.

And I do believe that the latter is what we've been arguing about all 
along...that we'd love to see the combined force of the WG to work on 
some more semantic markup alternatives, rather than simply saying "there 
currently aren't any elements that can adequately cover these cases, so 
authors have traditionally used this presentational markup, therefore we 
can't introduce more adequate elements".

P
-- 
Patrick H. Lauke
______________________________________________________________
re·dux (adj.): brought back; returned. used postpositively
[latin : re-, re- + dux, leader; see duke.]
www.splintered.co.uk | www.photographia.co.uk
http://redux.deviantart.com
______________________________________________________________
Co-lead, Web Standards Project (WaSP) Accessibility Task Force
http://webstandards.org/
______________________________________________________________
Take it to the streets ... join the WaSP Street Team
http://streetteam.webstandards.org/
______________________________________________________________

Received on Thursday, 3 May 2007 21:18:00 UTC