Re: New tags. (fwd) -Reply (fwd)

| From: Paul Prescod <papresco@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca>
| 
| Creeping presentationism (B, FONT, etc.) have made it near impossible to
| argue that "HTML [should] remain free of tags that apply only to
| presentation." The beginning and end of any such discussion will be: "If
| presentation markup is so bad, why does HTML 3.2 do it?" Which reduces
| us to shouting down individual proposals rather than making an argument
| based on design, architecture and direction.
---

It's worth noting that there's nothing wrong with presentation tags *as
long as they are in addition to structural tags*.  The problem is that
naive authors often use the presentation tags instead of structural
tags, leading to loss of information.  Presentation information, whether
in the tagging or in stylesheets, is also important to the success of
the medium and the documents.

Once stylesheets are well established and all the introductory books
explain how to use them, I think a lot of the fervor for pure
presentation tags will change to requests for new stylesheet
capabilities, at least for some things.  Indent, for instance, is an
obvious stylesheet issue.  Marking where page breaks occur in a printed
version is more likely to be a tagging issue, but indicating whether
every H2 should start a new page is more likely a stylesheet issue.
A few months after Netscape has CSS support the dialog should be
significantly different...

scott

--
scott preece
motorola/css 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 Thursday, 16 January 1997 09:06:20 UTC