Re: Generic Markup [was:Re: deprecated tags in Wilbur & Cougar]

me
|>There will probably be many cases with significant overlap between the two
|>classes of classes (metaclasses?), but this bifurcation relieves the
|>requirement that indexers and document management be held hostage to the
|>imperatives or the art department.
paul 
|I explained how you can do this practictally in HTML in my last message. Do
|you have any problems with my proposed mechanism? The art department will
|have to be roped in and taught how to use structural markup or else how to
|use the existant escape mechanism (STYLE).

HTML exists primarily as platform-independent delivery and rendering language
that inherits SGML's structural properties.  HTML is <B>historically</B>
optimized towards <H1>presentation</H1> <I>over</I> <p>structure.  

Yes, we can use inline style attributes to cover special cases, and I have
argued *for* inline style in the past <b style="css: color="blue-in-the-face">
as a convenient shorthand for low-duty applications,</b> not a solution for 
real publishing.  And if I have time on my hands to "do it right," then inline 
style is a solution that is far less than complete. But if there is a permanent 
moritorium on new structural tags (as there should be), and the semantics of 
extant tags are to be expressed by the same mechanism as rendering, and 
structure is still independent of rendering, then there exists a gap.  

If structure and presentation are to be separated and this is accomplished by
replacing expressions of structure (SGML elements) with style-sheet-based 
classes (attributes) attached to generic structural elements, then we have
come full circle, and structure becomes tied again to presentation instead of 
the other way around.

-marc

Received on Thursday, 8 August 1996 11:37:22 UTC