Re: I come not to praise HTML, but yada yada yada

From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Sun Dec 26 1999 - 08:13:35 MST


On Sun, 26 Dec 1999, Eugene Leitl wrote:

>
> It would be sure nice to have the markup information in a different
> part of the document (stripping markup is trivial then). But it would
> be essentially impossible to write this in a text editor then.

Eugene and Michael both seem a little more versed in the theoretical
aspects of HTML/XML, etc. than I. [Guys, just for a New Year's
present for me, can you cite something that you are not expert in
so I can quickly go do a crash course in it so I can have an even
odds chance at balancing the books...?]

Given my down in the trenches approach to HTML and document conversions,
I do agree with Eugene's comments that the separation of the "data" from
the "presentation" would be nice. The classic "column" format of newspapers
and some journals is an example of a media presentation specific requirement.
I've got hundreds of dual-column journal documents that end up in single
column in HTML. (This makes complete sense since one cannot easily
reformat "image" pages from journals that are designed from letter or A4
format in the alternate format.) However, to the degree that multi-column
format enhances readability it would be nice to be able to label text
with that presentation option.

Given the forthcoming eMedia like eBooks means that documents may
need a variety of presentation styles. Say I want to look at a
corporate report with one eBook reading the text in portrait mode
with another eBook reading the tables in landscape mode. How do you
get to the point where you can have a document format that specifies
that the (text) portrait pages go to Book (P) while the (table) landscape
pages go to Book (L)? Ideally you would want the document to specify
this type of information and the server to direct the output pages
appropriately.

Hey, this must be a new idea, can't I patent this????

R.



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