meta text (Re: Seriffed and...)

Philippe-Andre Prindeville <philipp@res.enst.fr> wrote:
> (...)
> So, we have the notions of "text" and "meta-text", ie. text on
> the text itself.  Bold and italic aren't sufficient for denoting
> the difference.  The meta-text itself can in turn be <strong> or
> <em>...
>
> Can we introduce a new mechanism?  <ss> (for sans-serif)?

There is no obvious link between sans-serif/serif and meta/object, so this
would just add another formatting tag, bringing HTML closer yet to a
word-processing format. Now if HTML is to evolve in a useful way, it has to
tell browsers about content, not formatting.

In that line, along with the new support for math in version 3, the
introduction of a <meta> tag would seem quite reasonable to me. The need for
such a distinction is common. For specialized litterature in fact (like
mathematical logic prose), some generality could even be useful, e.g. a
<meta1> for text about normal text and a <meta2> for text about meta1-text.

Jacques Du Pasquier
pasquier@cui.unige.ch

Received on Wednesday, 19 April 1995 16:46:27 UTC