Re: Shelby's Final Position Paper on XBL

On Monday 06 January 2003 4:22 pm, Herr Christian Wolfgang Hujer wrote:

> Presentation is presenting content to an intelligent user, which usually
> is a human end user only, but which also might be cats, dogs, monkeys,
> aliens etc..

I think a slightly better way of putting it is:

Presentation is the buffer between document encoding and document 
consumption.

This covers:

HTML+CSS rendered graphically in a browser window.
HTML rendered aurally for later listening.
HTML rendered as an in-memory tree structure for search engine crawlers.
XML served, with XSLT applied to present XHTML to browsers.

This seems to be a quite diverse range of situations, all of which can be 
considered to be "stylistic" (except, perhaps, the SE example).

Behaviour is a special case because it involves interaction by the user, and 
can conceivably alter the original encoding.

I consider semantics to be a property of the document encoding.

Therefore, I don't consider behaviour to be able to change semantics unless 
it changes the original encoding of the document (which rules out both CSS 
and XBL, I believe).

Is this discussion useful, or should we all collectively knock this thread 
on the head?

-- 
Jim Dabell

Received on Monday, 6 January 2003 11:44:29 UTC