- From: Jens Meiert <jens.meiert@erde3.com>
- Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 09:13:26 +0200 (MEST)
- To: John Lewis <lewi0371@mrs.umn.edu>, www-html@w3.org
If you introduce a sentence element, I will cancel all Markup related activity ;) I don't feel the need to explain this, for me <sentence /> sounds really stupid (sorry, that's my opinion)... and <word /> comes next!? Jens Meiert. > Brock wrote on Wednesday, May 14, 2003 at 6:24:33 PM: > > > seperation of meaning from presentation is the holy grail > > The existence of a sentence element, which has been discussed here > before, wouldn't affect the content in such a drastic way. > > Example without a sentence element: > > <p>Alice had no more breath for talking, so the trotted on in > silence, till they came in sight of a great crowd, in the middle > of which the Lion and Unicorn were fighting. They were in such a > cloud of dust, that at first Alice could not make out which was > which: but she soon managed to distinguish the Unicorn by his > horn.</p> > > Example with a sentence element: > > <p><sentence>Alice had no more breath for talking, so the trotted > on in silence, till they came in sight of a great crowd, in the > middle of which the Lion and Unicorn were fighting.</sentence> > <sentence>They were in such a cloud of dust, that at first Alice > could not make out which was which: but she soon managed to > distinguish the Unicorn by his horn.</sentence></p> > > For example, you could delete the space between sentences and replace > it with padding, but you would be incorrect to do so. Without a > particular style sheet, your content becomes: > > Alice had no more breath for talking, so the trotted on in > silence, till they came in sight of a great crowd, in the middle > of which the Lion and Unicorn were fighting.They were in such a > cloud of dust, that at first Alice could not make out which was > which: but she soon managed to distinguish the Unicorn by his > horn. > > Which is obviously incorrect. I think suggesting such a style as > default, for a theoretical sentence element, would be seriously > misguided. Yet it's probably less radical than your suggestion, which > makes even less sense. > > The purpose of XHTML isn't to replace content with markup, purely for > the sake of markup. The source is supposed to be human readable, for > one. Obviously some replacement happens, but not without reason. For > example, take the ol element. Something like this: > > <ol> > <li>Stir</li> > <li>Beat</li> > </ol> > > Will probably look like this: > > 1. Stir > 2. Beat > > But could look like this, without a loss of meaning: > > A. Stir > B. Beat > > If that would appear in plain text, the numbering system would need to > be embedded, something some consider a bad thing (e.g., with embedded > list markers you need to alter them by hand in order to change deeply > nested lists around). However, some people desire a marker element for > that very purpose (citing legal text as one example where it's > needed): > > <ol> > <li><m>1.</m> Stir</li> > <li><m>2.</m> Beat</li> > </ol> > > I don't have much of an opinion on that. Usually the marker isn't > important to me; although Etan Wexler made a good argument for it > <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2003Feb/0093.html> on > this list: > > The typical argument for the 'value' attribute states that the > list numbering is an essential part of the content and is not > merely style. If we accept this argument, it follows that we want > an element type dedicated to list item markers, bringing all the > usual benefits (easy styling, ability to add metadata, > internationalization, better degradation to plain text). > > I don't know what to tell you, if you truly believe italic text is > essential to the meaning of your documents. Maybe you should give HTML > 3.2 <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html32.html> a whirl. > > -- > John Lewis > -- Jens Meiert Steubenstr. 28 D-26123 Oldenburg Telefon +49 (0)441 99 86 147 Telefax +49 (0)89 1488 2325 91 Mobil +49 (0)175 78 4146 5 eMail <jens@meiert.com> Internet <http://meiert.com>
Received on Thursday, 22 May 2003 03:13:35 UTC