Re: Font-style vs. phrase elements (fwd)

  From: MegaZone <megazone@livingston.com>
| 
| So you want to *force* <DIV> to be used?  Why???  Right not the 
| implementations I've seen add whitespace, and making headers just the
| first line of a <DIV>?  So how about subheaders, I'd need a div on each
| subheader in a FAQ?
| 
| No thanks, no way in hell I'd use that.  There is no reason to force DIV
| to be used dozens of times in a document like that.
---

Well, some of us think it is a serious mistake that the HTML DTD fails
to associate headers with any particular part of the document.  The
current HTML H* tags are, in many ways, presentation markup, rather than
structural markup - they indicate that the text is to be styled like a
header, but they don't adequately indicate what the heading heads or,
for that matter, unambiguously place it in a hierarchy of sections,
since the author is not constrained to observe the numerical
relationships between header types.

It would have been better to have a tag that defines a section of the
document and contains a header as part of its content.  This would have
made the association between a given heading and a given section of the
document much clearer.  Among other things, this would make it possible
for a retrieval system to retrieve a section of a document, rather than
always retrieving a complete page, and to do search logic based on
keywords within a section, rather than within the whole page.

The proposed use of DIV would enforce a clear hierrarchy of sections in
a document.  This would be significantly better structural markup.

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, 22 May 1996 09:18:24 UTC