Re: Goals of HTML (and XML)? (was Re: Foreign Words and Phrases..)

Markku Savela felt an urge to reveal at 2:13 AM -0500 on 1997-09-25:

> 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.

Along with KBD, SAMP, VAR, etc...  But I don't think the time has come to
think of HTML as a complete language that can now be exclusionary.  While I
agree that perhaps *extrememly* specific structural elements (ones that
specify species vs. genus, for example) shouldn't be added to HTML, I think
there still needs to be an all-out element that basically structurally says
"This is a tag that means it is not of this language but is being used in
it as a term or understandable phrase."  In that sense, foreign words,
taxonomic names, indeed, anything idea concept not in the language of the
rest of the page could be used.  It wouldn't require then, a
semantic-specific derivation; instead, it would be used only to indicate:
"Here is something different, that has a language associated with it but is
being placed directly within the text itself."

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[                    Jordan Reiter                     ]
[            mailto:jreiter@mail.slc.edu               ]
[       "Don't you realize that intellectual people    ]
[        are all ignorant because they can't spray     ]
[        paint that small?"                            ]
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Received on Thursday, 25 September 1997 15:35:04 UTC