From: Harvey Newstrom (newstrom@newstaffinc.com)
Date: Sun Dec 26 1999 - 10:57:24 MST
Eugene Leitl <eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de> wrote on Sunday, December
26, 1999 5:34 am,
> Michael M. Butler writes:
> > Speaking for myself and the Xanadu crowd, the first hideous thing about
> > HTML is that it is _embedded_, and from this stems many of its
> > deficiencies. Fortunately, one can envision a system where embedding is
> > done JIT and people never have to be bothered by it.
Are you not aware of style-sheets? The definitions for position, layout,
font face, font style, font-size, font-color, etc., are defined in a
separate document and get applied to the HTML document at displaytime.
All the tortuous display tags, such as font, color, size, etc., that you
describe were bogus Netscape and Microsoft extensions to HTML that were
briefly accepted into the standard as a compromise. They were not intended
from the beginning. Such tags totally break the SGML syntax of the language
and make it extremely inconsistent to parse. True HTML and a true SGML
extension, as HTML is supposed to be, contain very few tags. Just the
minimum tags to identify text as a "header", or "body", or "caption" should
be necessary. Then the detailed display and formatting parameters would be
found with a lookup into the stylesheet.
-- Harvey Newstrom <http://harveynewstrom.com> Certified Consultant, Legal Hacker, Engineer, Research Scientist, Author.
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