Re: What's presentation?

At 8:42 AM -0500 12/1/00, Leonard R. Kasday wrote:
>Say I've surveyed people from various countries and ages to find out 
>their favorite movies.  Consider these two versions of a web page:
>version 1. H1 headings which are counties, H2 headings which are 
>ages, and body text within the H2 that says "Favorite movie is x"
>version 2. H1 headings which are ages, H2 headings which are 
>countries, and the same body text.
>Now, if you just look at the HTML, you'll say these are different 
>content/structure. However, you might also consider the underlying 
>data as the content and say that these are different presentations.
>So are these (a) different content/structure or (b) different 
>presentations?  Please answer (a) or (b) :-).

They are different presentations of the same content, which is why
it is very useful to think of XHTML as a display language, not a
content language.  A correct content language would be written in
XML and would not have "headings", which are simply one way of
translating content into a format which can be displayed on a
specific type of output agent -- a web browser.

This isn't the only way to display that content, or even the best
way to do it.  This is presentation markup.  All XHTML is presentation
markup. :)

So -- (b).

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

Received on Friday, 1 December 2000 23:22:57 UTC