Re: Separation of semantics and styling

> Christopher Evans:
> "HTML should represent the semantics of a document."
>
> Surely not! Semantics is to do with meaning. What HTML represents is
> structure.
>
>
> Christopher

I suggest we compromise on "structural semantics", i.e. the meaning of the
structure. For example: <ol> represents a list of things which have a
logical order. It says (or should say) nothing about how that list is to be
presented. That is the job of CSS. As you point out, it also says nothing
about the specific meaning of each item (or the collected group of items)
within the list.

The term 'semantics' has been used extensively as the foil to 'style' in the
usenet newsgroups where I have been participating recently. I did not intend
to muddle the point of my original post by using an inappropriate term.

Sorry for any confustion.

Chris Beall

Received on Saturday, 11 February 2006 18:43:52 UTC