Re: 'Poetry' Element

 From: Chris Lilley <Chris.Lilley@sophia.inria.fr>

| Not the way I read it:
| 
|  " The PRE element represents a character cell block of text and is 
|    suitable for text that has been formatted for a monospaced font." [1]
| 
| Suitable for, not requires or mandates. Putting a style attribute on a
| PRE element clearly indicates that the default rendering is to be
| modified in some way. It appears that the phrasing also indicates the
| properties of text which has already beeen laid out and then imported,
| not the rendering of the resulting HTML element.
---

Well, I would respectfully disagree.  The words "character cell" and the
definition of behavior of tab characters would imply to me that the
essential semantic of PRE includes alignment of character positions
within lines.  There are two interesting questions here:

	1) what should a browser do when this particular bit of
	   coding is presented to it?

	2) what should a browser do when the stylesheet conflicts with
	   the defined semantics of the tagging?

I don't see a clear answer to (1) in the standard - it is not clear to
me that specifying the font-family necessarily implies that it should be
spaced in the "natural" way for that font.

In the IEEE standards world one would submit such
questions to the Interpretations Committee - is there such a beast for
IETF standards?  W3C standards?

Question (2) applies to your interpretation and to several questions
that have been brought up recently (like setting DISPLAY to INLINE on BR
elements, setting FONT-COLOR BLUE text to RED, or asking that EM text
not be emphasized). I fully agree that the user should be able to make
the browser do what she wishes, but I wonder if the "confomance" rules
should require the browser to warn the user when a stylesheet (or
a display limitation) has (as in those examples) altered presentation in a
way that violates HTML's defined semantics.

scott

--
scott preece
motorola/mcg urbana design center	1101 e. university, urbana, il   61801
phone:	217-384-8589			  fax:	217-384-8550
internet mail:	preece@urbana.mcd.mot.com

Received on Wednesday, 3 July 1996 12:06:57 UTC