- From: Murray Altheim <murray.altheim@nttc.edu>
- Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 16:12:21 -0400
- To: joe@art.com
- Cc: www-html@w3.org
>Joe English <joe@art.com> wrote: >> Ian Graham <igraham@hprc.utoronto.ca> wrote: >> >> > My point is that, when converting legacy documents, there is often *no* >> > primary meaning -- you only have the physical style. [...] I must agree. In my experience the majority of the web content I've put online has been legacy documents of which I was not the author: the NASA Strategic Plan, for example, which I was not authorized to "modify" in any way (as might be expected). Even documents being written for inclusion on our server come to me containing a word processor's physical styles. As legacy documents generally contain *only* physical styles, document curators would be forced to make decisions regarding the author's intentions for each instance of a physical style, eg., "does this warrant emphasis or strong emphasis" for bold, or "is this a citation or a blockquote" for italic?. These types of decisions I warrant will not be made properly by document conversion routines, only through manual editing. Given that curators don't always have access to the document author for these types of decisions, physical markup becomes a necessity. >I have assumed that deprecation is (hopefully) the 'elemental' road to >>oblivion. [...] If this is true, then IMO certain physical styles should never be deprecated but remain within the recommended part of the spec, assuming that conversion of legacy documents will always be an issue. >> > This is a nontrivial debate, considering the types of things Netscape has >> > tried to fiddle in with their FONT element. (I used this name for a >> > reason!). So, the question becomes -- where does one stop with physical >> > formatting elements? >> >> My opinion: add exactly one more element, and then stop. Any new >> formatting characteristics should be added as attributes on that >> element. (This would have to be a new element because all of >> the existing formatting elements are special-purpose.) > >> --Joe English > >If deprecating all the other physical elements is acceptable, and workable, >then I heartily agree. I just don't think that it would be acceptable, to >the user community, to do so. > >Ian ............................................. igraham@hprc.utoronto.ca I believe if we look at the majority of our source documents, and the types of physical styles that they contain, it provides us with a model of which to include, simply for sake of legacy document conversion. I think this is intelligently handled in the current DTD (although I will disagree on SMALL and BIG). While issues of text size obviously need to be handled differently, commonly used character modifications (such as bold, underline or italic), as well as placement (subscript/superscript), need to be available as markup. <STRONG>Unfortunately</STRONG>, the editing tools used to create the majority of modern documents use physical styles to modify text. When MS Word and WordPerfect begin implementing Emphasis and Citation as character formatting options, we can <B>begin</B> to deprecate physical styles. If I'm taking your statement correctly, Joe, then this new element would be something akin to a generic physical style element, with the attribute containing the physical style information. I would turn this entirely on its head, given the current discussion. If most source text comes from legacy documents, then physical markup can continue to be created by conversion routines. I would prefer instead that ALL logical/semantic/informational (depending on your language) markup be a single element, with attributes providing the semantic information (eg., VAR,DFN,EM,STRONG,ABBREV, etc.). This would allow for: 1. all sorts of subclassing (as per Benjamin, Paul et al's discussion on the subject) based on content rather than appearance 2. more consistent markup: all physical markup would be literally implemented (bold tags for bold text), while semantic information would be covered by one element. 3. allow informational formatting to proceed according to stylesheets, leaving physical markup solely to the browser as per the original source document's display characteristics, unless overridden. This obviously is a radical rewrite of the current DTD, but I think it warrants some consideration. Murray __________________________________________________________________ Murray M. Altheim, Information Systems Analyst National Technology Transfer Center, Wheeling, West Virginia email: murray.altheim@nttc.edu www: http://ogopogo.nttc.edu/people/maltheim/maltheim.html
Received on Thursday, 27 July 1995 16:15:14 UTC