Re: Ubiquity of Netscape (Mozilla Eats the World)

Glenn Davis <gdavis@infi.net> writes:

>Now, here's the Netscape way:
><hr>
><center>Insert text here</center>
><hr>
>Here's an imperfect representation of the result:
>-----------------------------------------------------
>                  Insert text here
>-----------------------------------------------------

This example illustrates your position well, and I understand what you
are trying to accomplish (having worked for several years as a typesetter,
I can appreciate the desire to make something look nice).

However, there are some very good reasons for marking things up based on
structure rather than trying to achieve a certain appearance.

>Did you notice any difference?  To my eye, the "standards" way
>inserts extra spacing.  What if I don't want extra spacing?  How do
>I get the same result from the "standards" that I get with the netscape
><center>?

The only good answer to this problem is: What are you trying to accomplish
with the text "Insert text here"? It looks like a heading, in which case
you should use one of the <H?> tags, like <H2>...</H2> or <H3>...</H3>.

I don't think I'm qualified to give a good argument for why structure-based
formatting is better than the visual type, but I've seen some good reasons
for this in the past. (Is this documented on the Web, anyone?)

Here's one practical example of how these heading levels can be used:

Suppose (here we go again with the suppositions) that I want to construct
a list of links for some people in the Humanities department, print it out
and show it to them to get them interested in the Net: kind of a "teaser".
I could find the best sites, put them in a list somewhere, then write a
robot to retrieve them all and make a list of the headings contained on
each page. For example,

The On-line Books Page

    Index of On-Line Books
    General English Repositories
    Specialty or foreign-language repositories
    Book Catalogues and Retailers

Miss Saigon information Page
Recordings
    Wish List of Recordings
    New Recordings?
    Current Productions of Miss Saigon
    Cast List
        Broadway
        London
    Publications
    Mailing List for Miss Saigon
    Another Miss Saigon Page

(This isn't a very good example but I don't have time to find better ones).

If these documents were prepared with intelligent choices for headings, and
created with the appropriate markup (i.e., h1, h2, h3), such a program is
possible (actually, trivial).

On the other hand, if you decide you want headings to be like this:

<hr>
<center>Insert text here</center>
<hr>

it would not be possible.

There are a lot of other advantages to this type of formatting, but I can't
think of any right now (like I said, I'm not qualified to present this side
of the argument). Anyway, we're not the first ones to have this discussion:

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/SGML.html

| High level markup
| 
| An SGML document is marked up in a way which says nothing about the
| representation of the document on paper or a screen. A presentation
| program must marge the document with style information in order to
| produce a printed copy. This is invaluable when it comes to interchange
| of documents between different systems, providing different views of a
| document, extracting information about it, and for machine processing
| in general.  However, some authors feel that the act of communication
| includes the entire design of the document, and if this is done
| correctly the formatting is an essential part of authoring.  They
| resist any attempts to change the representation used for their
| documents.

This was written by Tim Berners-Lee, probably way back in 1991 or 1992 or
something. It's probably been a topic of argument in comp.text.sgml since
its creation.

Gerald
-- 
http://ugweb.cs.ualberta.ca/~gerald/