On 12 Jul 2002, it is alleged that fantasai sauntered in to netscape.public.mozilla.documentation and loudly proclaimed:
> Brian Heinrich wrote: >> >> On 11 Jul 2002, it is alleged that fantasai sauntered in to >> netscape.public.mozilla.documentation and loudly proclaimed: > ... > > All good points, of course. I would hardly say "loudly proclaimed", > though, since I did slip almost all of that in with an example I > originally wrote up to demonstrate the use of class="para" in the Markup > Guide. :) All right, all right; just a generic header -- no offence meant. :-) > I don't claim any expertise in technical documentation; this > bit of text you're tearing apart is just my reaction to some of the > online documentation I've had to read. As for lists, you might want to > re-read the actual text of my message and then compare the rendered > result of the example with what would be the text if I had forced that > list into paragraph form. I'm certainly /not/ saying that lists don't have their utility; I certainly made copious -- and, I hope, appropriate -- use of them in the 1.0 Guide pages. If you look at your list and think of it in terms of part of a larger document, you'll see that some of the items likely require further elucidation or clarification. (BTW, I wasn't trying to tear apart your text; at least that wasn't my intent . . . for what authorial intent is worth nowadays.) >> Most often, yes. There are various ways in which to go about this. >> (BTW, fantasai, this is part of my problem with structural/semantic >> tags: there are time I want to highlight information in a purely >> physical/presentational way, and often the rationale for doing so is >> simply to give a bit of guidance to a reader who might just be skimming >> the text.) > > But using <b> to do so will not help anyone without a graphical browser. /This/, at least, makes sense; it's the first time I've actually encountered a compelling argument in favour of purely structural mark-up. > At least if you declare your intent--which is to highlight the > information--someone can write the necessary style rules for devices > with other capabilities. (Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean they > /will/, but it makes it possible to do so later without recoding your > pages. ;) Fair 'nuff. > ~fantasai /b.
