- From: Mike Batchelor <mikebat@clark.net>
- Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 14:23:52 -0400 (EDT)
- To: www-html@www10.w3.org, www-style@www10.w3.org
Benjamin C. W. Sittler once wrote... > > What's wrong with P CLASS=whatever is that this information is totally > unusable by non-stylesheet browsers. > > Please, let's keep <INS>, <DEL>, <SAMP>, etc... the information-type > elements are far more useful, especially in non-stylesheet browsers, than > subclassed elements. <INS>, <DEL> and <SAMP> are unuseable on non-HTML3 browsers. For that matter, so is the CLASS attribute. And if you believe that CLASS is useless on non-stylesheet browsers, then you have misunderstood what CLASS is for. Style sheets are merely one application of the CLASS attribute. They are useful for precisely the application you have in mind, which is to further specify the kind of data enclosed within a tag. That stylesheets can take advantage of this is a happy consequence of a good idea. Who knows what a 3D VR browser, hooked into your Thesaurus and running in conjunction with the linguistics expert system embedded in Windows99, will make of the CLASS attribute. Your pages could look far more exciting than you can imagine, and you won't have to change a thing. Here's an experiment: Make up a plain HTML2 document, with sample text enclosed in each of the HTML2 tags, and have a look at it with as many browsers as you can. Without prior knowledge of which passage has what tag, you won't be able to tell the difference *by appearance* between a large fraction of them, and this is just the small set of unique tags in HTML2. There is no reason why this would change just because HTML3 is available. The browsers still have to support rendering the new tags differently from surrounding text. HTML suggests some renderings, but they are not requirements. An indexing robot knows the difference, though, and it doesn't care how it looks in any browser. It's completely irrelevant. This is not an argument against including <INS>, <DEL> and <SAMP>. I am simply trying to show why I think the reason you want them included betrays some amount of misunderstanding about what HTML is trying to accomplish. -- %%%%%% mikebat@clark.net %%%%%% http://www.clark.net/pub/mikebat/ %%%%%%
Received on Wednesday, 26 July 1995 14:27:32 UTC