Re: Structure Again!

At 2:49 PM -0800 11/23/00, William Loughborough wrote:
>The only reason that a selection of "bold" means "more important" is 
>because the author and user have some previous agreement to that 
>effect - [...]

Which sounds curiously like the definition of "semantics" itself.  The
only reason that any HTML tags mean anything is because someone agreed
on them.  If I add <important>my own tags</important>, those are less
"semantic" because nobody would agree what they meant.

>The fact that so few people are even aware of the concept of 
>structured documents is why there is often little understanding of 
><h1> as structure, despite its non-committal name.

The problem with this line of thinking is that it assumes that documents
must follow a heading-based document structure.  This is one reason why,
in another message, I wrote that XHTML is a poor general data format.
XHTML (and HTML) defines _one_ type of document decently, and doesn't
deal well with most other types of documents.

For example, the average web page is not rightly a heading-based
structure.  This is one of the primary reasons why <h1> structures are
not used.  It's not that web designers are consciously deciding to be
irresponsible -- it's because a hierarchical outline structure to a
document does not fit their needs.  XHTML structural tags are not
used because they have proven, repeatedly, to be insufficient for
the needs of the people using them.

--Kynn
-- 
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
http://www.kynn.com/

Received on Monday, 27 November 2000 14:34:58 UTC