Assume hear hear inserted appropriately below :-)
Simon
At 13:45 09/01/2001 -0700, Matthew P. Barnson wrote:
>Grr, therein lies the problem entirely with HTML:
>How do I know if that H1 is the title of the page, or just something a person
>wanted really big?
>
>How does one know if that "<P>" tag indicates a block of addresses, a break
>between paragraphs, or what?
>
>How do I know if the "<pre>" tag indicates a block of commands to be executed
>by the user, or just a chunk of a note someone threw into the page and didn't
>have time to mark up?
>
>The key thing is: what audience are we targetting with our documentation? If
>the audience is *solely* web-based, yeah, standardizing on HTML is better
>than nothing. But what if someone needs to print them out? HTML looks
>butt-nasty when printed, I'm sorry. What if a publisher wishes to reprint
>the documentation in book form? He will have an enormous time investment by
>someone to convert it to a format the publisher can use. What if you want to
>implement a search engine? The engine will pick up titles, meta tags,
>comments, etc. and have no clue what type of data it is looking at, thus
>continuing to make the Web more of a morass than it already is.
>
>Semantic markup is vital to progress -- although I understand the concerns
>that people should not be required to write in DocBook (and I quite agree),
>it should be allowed and supported because those DocBook XML authors have
>invested the time to make the world a better place : )
>
>Mozilla supports XML, too, if I recall correctly -- DocBook is also an XML
>DTD and, if the DTD is correctly installed on the users computer, should be
>readable...
>
>--
>Matthew P. Barnson Manager, Systems Administration
>Excite@Home [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>"There is no spoon" -- Neo
We are not here to be nice to people.
