Re: deprecated tags in Wilbur & Cougar -Reply -Reply

 From: Mike Wexler <mwexler@mv.us.adobe.com>

| I think authors and organization that create lots of documents should be
| able to create there own classes.
| 
| I am currently working on a tool that exports FrameMaker documents to HTML.
| It takes the styles specified in the paragraph and character catalogs
| and generates a style sheet. It then will split a FrameMaker document (or
| book) into many HTML pages that are linked together. All of the link documents
| share the same style sheet. Documents that come from a common template will
| also be able to share style sheets.
---

That's what I tried to convey by talking about the scope of
standardization being a continuum.  A common template *is* a standard,
though only for the community using that template.  Increasing
formality and broader applicability lead to a larger community, but the
issues are the same.

However, I believe strongly that in a year or two there will be a few
common stylesheets provided by the UA vendors and key content providers
and that most authors will use them.  That *has* to happen if
stylesheets are to achieve their user-assistance goals.  If users are to
be able to control the form of displayed material by providing personal
stylesheets, they need to be know what classes they can control.

Again, reusability over a broad scope requires standardization.

--- 
| It would be unfortunate if the W3C or UA authors decided to limit the
| flexibility of CSS by specifying certain standardized classes. It would
| mean at a minimum, that tools like mine would have to check for all the 
| prespecified classes and avoid them (no telling if the author of a FrameMaker
| document really meant paragraph tag FOO to mean the same as W3C's class FOO.
---

This is a minor problem that can be solved trivially by naming rules, as
it is for programming libraries.  The standard has to say something like
"All names beginning 'W3C-' are reserved to the W3C; etc."  Some piece
of the namespace needs to be reserved to individual authors and there
needs to be a prefix convention, just as ASCII C and POSIX reserve parts
of the symbol namespace for future standards, parts for system vendors,
and parts for application authors.

I basically agree with your other points - semantic information is
better carried by elements than classes (since that allows validation
against a DTD) and the right way for this to evolve is via browsers that
actually support SGML and arbitrary DTDs.

scott

--
scott preece
motorola/mcg urbana design center	1101 e. university, urbana, il   61801
phone:	217-384-8589			  fax:	217-384-8550
internet mail:	preece@urbana.mcd.mot.com

Received on Wednesday, 7 August 1996 17:24:35 UTC