- From: Michel Fortin <michel.fortin@michelf.com>
- Date: Sun, 5 Nov 2006 12:09:16 -0500
Le 5 nov. 2006 ? 7:42, Elliotte Harold a ?crit : > There are always edge cases. The distinction between semantics and > presentation is a fuzzy one. Nonetheless, I think most of the time > height and width as specified on today's img tags are clearly > presentational. I'm beginning to get lost in this debate. Style and presentation (the words) applies to so many thing, but I wonder if it hasn't become a synonym for "visual style" and "visual presentation" in this discussion. I mean, by style you could mean style of writing, by presentation you may talk about how the author chose his words to present an idea; surely no one wants to see that part of a CSS stylesheet. As Elliotte said, the line between semantics (the content) and what is the formatting (visual presentation) is sometime blurry. To me, what should be part of HTML is what describes the content of a document; whether it's textual content, visual content, or audio content should have no importance: if something is part of the content then it should be in the markup, not in an external stylesheet. I think that ideally, such markup should express what the author means (<em> more semantic than <i>), but that's not always a workable solution, and in those cases it's good to have fallback solutions. The style attribute is one of them, although style="" has its shortcoming: it requires CSS support. So, to what extent should HTML be tied to CSS for an acceptable rendering of documents? I mean, if a browser that cannot handle CSS cannot display the content in a readable manner, aren't we breaking the separation of the content from the (visual) presentation? - - - Taking this back to the subject of height and width of images, I'd simply ask myself if the attributes are necessary to have an acceptable presentation. I see two cases in which the attributes have a benefit: 1. while the document is loading; 2. if the image needs to be resized. I won't rehash case one, I think it's clear that many people consider that useful, useful enough at least to add these attributes to a lot of images even if they aren't resizing anything. Two is tricky too. Let's say I have a high resolution image of a mathematic formula inline in the text (presumably to have good results when printing). It's clear that you don't want the image of the formula to be too big: in this case the resizing, while clearly presentational, is absolutely necessary to have a readable document. I take note however that it'd be more useful to set the size in em or in ex than in pixels, the downside is that you need CSS for that. I also admit that this is a made up hypothetical case; maybe no one does that, I've no idea. Michel Fortin michel.fortin at michelf.com http://www.michelf.com/
Received on Sunday, 5 November 2006 09:09:16 UTC