Re: minor formulation suggestion ((X)HTML not presentational)

Kay, Michael wrote:


> The reason for converting a document to HTML/XHTML is almost without
> exception in order to present it to a human reader.


Yes, but HTML markup can either contain presentational (styling) markup, 
or not.

> I agree that the
> presentation is described at a fairly abstract level, but it's still
> presentation.


But "presentational" in an HTML context clearly is referring to the 
differentiation between styling (layout and design) vs structure and 
semantics:

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/conform.html
"In general, authors should use style sheets to achieve stylistic and 
formatting effects rather than HTML presentational attributes. HTML 
presentational attributes have been deprecated when style sheet 
alternatives exist"

... and not referring to differentiation between human target vs 
software reader (parser). And even in this context: (X)HTML is first 
read (parsed) by software.

Also in the the text I quoted, there is "add styling information to an 
XML source document", which should *not* be the case when transforming 
*XML to (X)HTML. This practice is deprecated, less supported in current 
versions of (X)HTML, and most likely will not be supported in future 
versions of XHTML.

I suggest to change

"The term stylesheet reflects the fact that one of the important roles 
of XSLT is to add styling information to an XML source document, by 
transforming it into a document consisting of XSL formatting objects 
(see [XSL Formatting Objects]), or into another presentation-oriented 
format such as HTML, XHTML, or SVG. However, XSLT is used for a wide 
range of XML-to-XML transformation tasks, not exclusively for formatting 
and presentation applications."

to

"The term stylesheet reflects the fact that one of the most important 
roles of XSLT was (and to a lesser extend still is) to add styling 
information to an XML source document, by transforming it into a 
document consisting of XSL formatting objects (see [XSL Formatting 
Objects]), or into another presentation-oriented format such as SVG. 
However, XSLT is used for a wide range of XML-to-XML transformation 
tasks, not exclusively for formatting and presentation applications."


> I've recently gone through the XML to make sure that all sections have
> meaningful IDs. Thanks for the comment.


My pleasure, happy to be of help.

Tobi


-- 
http://www.pinkjuice.com/

Received on Thursday, 12 June 2003 10:00:06 UTC