- From: Chuck D'Antonio <c_dantonio@harvard.edu>
- Date: Wed, 15 Jan 1997 14:12:14 -0400
- To: www-html@www10.w3.org
Walter Ian Kaye wrote: >Wow. So if your document is like 8< document outline snipped >and you want to change the style of the body text, you go and set the >fontname, fontsize, typestyle, alignment, first-line indent, etc repeatedly >for each instance of the body text? With a style sheet, you just change the >spec for the style, and all parts of the document which are of that type >will automatically reformat accordingly. A real timesaver, yes? Walter's amazement reminds me of working at the computer center during my (fairly recent) college days and watching honors thesis candidates reformat all of their indentations in a 150-200 page document because they changed the font and had used spaces instead of tabs all the way through. I felt the same disbelief then -- which was also invariably 3 a.m. the night the thesis was due. Too often I find myself reacting to mail from this list with disbelief about what people think HTML should be. Invariably several mails follow that talk about what HTML is and how the what the original sender thinks it should be doesn't fit what it is. Not often enough do we address why we think it should continue to grow in the same directions. Walter's mail just made me realize why I don't react that way, and I thought I'd pass my musing along. I think his exchange with MegaZone underscores a very important point in the presentational versus structural markup debate. It's difficult to convince word processor users of the need for structural markup because they've never thought of how they edit their documents in that way. This generalizes to many ideas about computer usage that seperate user from power user. It's all tied up in abstraction levels. Some people don't see a tab as anything more than white space or a subheading as anything more than a change in font and/or style. We continually see requests or commentary on this mailing list regarding increased facilities for presentational markup within the HTML tag set. We invariably argue back "that's a job for style sheets" or "HTML isn't used for presentational markup" without really considering what's going on. The problem I see isn't where the markup belongs or what HTML is, but rather a battle about what HTML should be and whether style sheets meet the author's needs. It doesn't really matter what W3's position is (or MS's or NS's), but how users of HTML think about what they're doing. To many people, <h2> doesn't exist independant of being larger and bolder than <h3>; it doesn't matter if we can talk about it as a tag that exists to categorize a heading less important that an <h1> and more important than an <h3>. Telling them that it isn't always larger and bolder that <h3> only suggests that whoever doesn't interpret it that way is wrong -- it doesn't indicate why they should think of it more generally. Once you've accepted the abstraction, it may mystify you that someone doesn't get it (it works that way for me) -- but they need to accept the abstraction before you can talk about anything else. You will not convince someone that <indent> or <page> or <vr> or any of the other tags we've seen suggested on this list doesn't belong in HTML without convincing arguments about why it matters that HTML remain free of tags that apply only to presentation on one particular medium. It's a recurrent debate regarding abstraction levels. Using the existance of abstraction to justify that abstraction achieves litte; you can only argue with those who accept the initial abstractions. Chuck -- Chuck D'Antonio Programmer & Network Support Specialist FAS Administrative Computing Harvard University
Received on Wednesday, 15 January 1997 14:12:29 UTC