Re: CSS and Eccentric Poems.

Stephanos Piperoglou wrote:
> The "problem" as I see it is that, even in light of CSS1 implementation,
> there is no tag that has NO other purpose other than applying a style to a
> selection. Styles can only be applied to phrase markup and block elements
> that ALREADY carry a meaning of sorts. When this is content markup, all's
> fine and dandy. If this is actually a tag that indicated rendering (like B
> and I), people get confused.

I can see the problem. HTML, intended to be a content markup language,
already had some presentation markup entities when N******* started
turning it into a presentation language. But we don't have to use any
presentational tags if we prefer not to. Instead of <B> and <I> we
can use <STRONG> and <EM>. If we want to alter the style of the
emphasis, we can use CSS to do so.

I would like to see <B> and <I> used primarily when it is important
(or legal) that something is rendered in bold and italics, and not
highlighted in some other way. For instance, if I were writing
equations, I would like to have my scalar variables in italics and
my vectors in bold, but not emphasised in any other way. If some
user agent running in a colour text environment uses red for <STRONG>
and purple for <EM>, I don't want my variables to be rendered in
that way.

The great advantage with style sheets is that we can separate content
and presentation, using HTML only for content markup (This is a heading,
this is a list, ...) and using CSS to define how we want headings and
lists to be rendered.
 
> What we should have is simply a tag (something like FORMAT or RENDER) which
> only has one attribute: CLASS.

We already have the <DIV> element (for block purposes) and the <SPAN>
element (inside blocks) that mostly or only are there for carrying the
CLASS attribute.

Of course we could use <SPAN CLASS="Bold"> everywhere we until now
have been using <STRONG>--if we really want to limit our audience to
those who have use a CSS-capable browser in a GUI environment.

Cajo.

-- 
Carl Johan Berglund <f92-cbe@nada.kth.se>
http://www.student.nada.kth.se/~f92-cbe/

Received on Thursday, 4 July 1996 07:56:37 UTC