Re: Link Relationship for Moving Down a Hierarchy

On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 11:00 AM, David Woolley <forums@david-woolley.me.uk>
wrote:
> Ian Hickson wrote:
>
>>
>> Why? That is, what software are you hoping will act on this, and what are
>> you hoping it will do with it?
>>
>
> Although my feeling was that "down" was too generic, I think that saying the
> relation should not be there reflects the loss of the declarative nature of
> HTML.

Disagree. Declarative languages attempt to effect software behavior, just like
imperative languages do. That's trivially true of programming languages, but
it's also true of markup languages. For example, from the TEI introduction:

"These Guidelines … make recommendations about suitable ways of representing
those features of textual resources which need to be identified explicitly in
order to facilitate processing by computer programs. In particular, they
specify a set of markers (or tags) which may be inserted in the electronic
representation of the text, in order to mark the text structure and other
features of interest. Many, or most, computer programs depend on the presence
of such explicit markers for their functionality, since without them a
digitized text appears to be nothing but a sequence of undifferentiated
bits."

http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/AB.html

> HTML markup shouldn't just be there to instruct the browser, but also to
> provide information on the author's intent.

Browsers are only one type of "software". I can't think of any other feature
that has ever been added to HTML without a view that some generic class of
software might make use of that declaration of intent. Can you?

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

Received on Monday, 17 January 2011 07:44:34 UTC