Re: SVG and HTML

In message <4.2.0.56.19990729111047.00c3c100@biomail.ucsd.edu>, 
Dmitry Beransky writes:
>
[...]
>
>After all, of all the people currently designing for the Web, how many do 
>actually care about or even understand the principles on which (X)HTML is 
>based.  All they want, is that their pages look the same everywhere.  And 
>that's exactly what SVG will give them.  Is our future, the future of the 
>Web in SVG?

Whether people care about structure depends on what their doing, of 
course.  Their are lots of people who only care about how pages look; some 
of them are
the ones whose pages are already one giant gif, with an image map.  But 
the structure conveys information that gets lost that way.  Knowing that a 
list is a list lets a screen reader for blind users _tell_ them that it's 
enumerating a list.  Heading tags let a search engine tell you whether 
hits occurred in section headings or in text (the Text Encoding Initiative 
<http://www.tei-c.org/> carries this to great lengths for academics doing 
textual analysis stuff.  All of this matters to some people.

--------
Sarr Blumson                     sarr@umich.edu
voice: +1 734 764 0253           FAX: +1 734 763 4434
ITD, University of Michigan      http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sarr/
519 W William, Ann Arbor, MI 48103-4943

Received on Thursday, 29 July 1999 15:36:39 UTC