- From: Bullard, Claude L (Len) <clbullar@ingr.com>
- Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 09:05:29 -0500
- To: "'DPawson@rnib.org.uk'" <DPawson@rnib.org.uk>
- Cc: www-tag@w3.org
It isn't wrong, it simply isn't demanded by XML. I keep seeing this "XML forces one to separate content from presentation" and in fact, it does no such thing. XML Doesn't Care. One does that because wants a stronger and more easily interpreted classification for the content, a label, if you please, that invokes or evokes more domain-specific interpretation. Rendering is just the last interpretation if indeed the content is to be rendered. A community of understanding will interpret (in the semiotic sense of interpretant) the same labels the same way. "Style for local application" is also overloaded because style means one thing to one community and something else to another. Plain English to you is suggestive and misleading elsewhere. That is why we document agreements, conserve nouns, play lawyer language games, etc. We can both agree that <h1> means a header-one to you and me and probably a lot of others. We can never convince a computer of that. We can get a computer to either/both recognize that generic id and set it to ARIAL BOLD SIZE 22 and we can also get it to tell us it found a header-one and maybe do something else useful. Both interpretations are perfectly legitimate. But content tagging usually means to call the information what some group calls it regardless of the document structure it is in. So <partno> can also be given ARIAL BOLD SIZE 22 but to consider it a "header one" wouldn't be reasonable, but only to a particular community of understanding. It is as said on XML-Dev, you can't really get away from having an external document somewhere to express that agreement. So not wrong, just weak. Without some explicit understanding of what it means to say <h1> vs <partno>, it is all just presentation. Humans aren't "local applications". len -----Original Message----- From: DPawson@rnib.org.uk [mailto:DPawson@rnib.org.uk] Do you believe that this seperate content from presentation position to be invalid, or just wrongly worded? I don't recall it being challenged as a principle in the ac meeting. I'd be interested in any variant on this you could offer please. 'Name it for maximum amount of unambiguous use' sounds kinda like semantic markup to me. I like the 'bind late for a given community use' though. My plain English would be 'style for local application', presuming a human end user.
Received on Tuesday, 20 August 2002 10:06:01 UTC