From: Michael M. Butler (butler@comp-lib.org)
Date: Sun Dec 26 1999 - 13:49:20 MST
> > 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.
Please tell me, where do I put HREFs in a style sheet?
Yes, I'm aware of style sheets. The embedded markup of bolding, color, etc.
may eventually wither away. That would be a good thing.
The deficiencies of HTML go much deeper, until and unless the embedded link
problems (which are acute) are solved. Several interim solutions have been
proposed. Perhaps one of those, or something yet unheard of, will
eventually gain wide acceptance. Until them, HTML is bad, style sheets or
no. But it's what's out there. That, and Augment.
MMB
>--
>Harvey Newstrom <http://harveynewstrom.com>
>Certified Consultant, Legal Hacker, Engineer, Research Scientist, Author.
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