Re: Visual Markup (should HTML die?)

> Except that the separation between the two made the job of an HTML 
> browser much more difficult, because now it needed to read two files 
> and correlate the data between them, and, to my mind at least, also 

Only marginally.

> made the job of a site designer much more difficult because it's 
> necessary to have two documents in mind whenever you create a site: the 
> HTML and the CSS.

It makes it easier for a designer with some brief to produce an appearance,
but who understands the structure of the content and is not afraid of
revealing it (marketing material often has hidden agendas which the 
designers would not want revealed).  It makes it marginally more difficult,
although only when you don't use inline styles, to write documents for
pure visual form with no understanding of structure, however neither
presentational HTML not HTML+CSS is good for this.

> on content rather than presentation, and XSLT makes it fairly painless 

I thought we were talking of making things easy for the (non-technical)
desginer.

> Why don't we just dump HTML and create a VML, a simple, 
> straightforward, easy to parse, quick to render, Visual Markup 
> Language. The idea would be to create content in XML and then translate 

Market forces will rapidly degrade it into a full featured graphics
language.  Actually, you  may already have such a language in one
of the more basic profiles of SVG.

> it to a platform-independent visual representation that would be more 
> controllable than HTML but also faster to process since the browser 
> would have to make fewer decisions. Some would say that, if that's what 

PDF readers have few decisions to make as well.

> I want, I should use PDF. But PDF is cumbersome, slow to process, and 

A lot of this is due to authoring tools that generate bloated Postscript,
e.g. individually placing every character, rather than placing words and
sentences with the occasional hint to override the default spacing.

The more I think about it, all you are doing is describing a basic 
profile of SVG, with some added forms capability.

Received on Sunday, 23 February 2003 03:55:13 UTC