- From: Markku Savela <msa@anise.tte.vtt.fi>
- Date: Thu, 25 Sep 1997 10:13:16 +0300 (EET DST)
- To: www-html@w3.org
This discussion seems to be shooting into directions where HTML is not intended to go, when it starts to talk about elements with application specific semantic (such as taxonomic names etc.). Such things are best left to other tagging systems (for example, XML based) or already existing SGML applications (TEI etc). HTML should stick to "logical presentation elements", for example <h1> is just heading, <p> is paragraph, <ul> is just list. None of these elements attempt to define what the information content is. And I think HTML should stick to this: include only elements that relate to logical presentation, but not to the information content. In this light, <address> is an example of an element that should not exist in HTML. Reading HTML 4.0 drafts, I can see that it mostly follows the above idea. The introduction of the styles confuses the issue. Why need all the elements when almost *everything* could be done with just few elements, for example, <span> and <div>. (There are things that cannot be expressed with styles (yet): tables, forms, anchors and maybe some others). The 'class' attribute also takes HTML dangerously close to application specific tagging systems. "<span class=taxon> ... </span>" is very close to "<taxon> ... </taxon>". Perhaps this is the right way to proceed in some cases: you can have WEB document and logical document in the same source (without needing to define a new SGML application and DTD). Then, one might question what we need XML for? -- Markku Savela (msa@hemuli.tte.vtt.fi), Technical Research Centre of Finland Multimedia Systems, P.O.Box 1203,FIN-02044 VTT,http://www.vtt.fi/tte/staff/msa/
Received on Thursday, 25 September 1997 03:13:34 UTC