> 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?
Because if they wanted it really big, they shouldn't be using H1 to
achieve that :-) That's the "strict" part - it means "content markup only,
not presentational".
The "Strict" bit is partly the way you use it, as well as the definition.
> 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.
Not if you apply a "printer" style sheet to stop it looking so. With a
site-wide sheet, this would only need to be written once.
> 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.
Actually, not really. If the markup is content-only, any form of
conversion can be reasonably well automated.
> 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 : )
HTML 4.01 Strict is semantic mark-up. :-)
> 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...
However, NS 4 and IE 4 don't :-(
Gerv
