Re: [WSG] Hot Topic: HTML design [was Reason for leaving]
* Terrence Wood [EMAIL PROTECTED] [2005-08-15 23:52]: Patrick Lauke wrote: Well folks, here's a crazy idea: let's start some good discussions on the principles of web standards then. We need a bit of a catalyst to get things started. Any hot topics anybody's got at the moment? With the recent departure of a member who found this forum boring I thought I'd open up a discussion on html design. First, let me explain what I mean by html design. One of the tenets of web standards design is the separation of content and presentation. The benefits of this are often explained in terms of easy site updates, the ability to change the visual design by simply updating the CSS, and improved accessibility. All good stuff, and increasingly (as we know), web sites are produced where content is on one file (html) and the presentation is in another (CSS) Another idea related to web standards is that of semantic markup, where markup is used to give the document structure - after all, html is a structural language - and the ultimate goal is to create a web that is usable by both machines (semantic web) and people. So, when I use the term html design I am talking about how a web page is marked up, not only in terms of separating presentation and content, but how the document appears without reference to the visual design. By and large html design is not something happening in practice. Documents are marked up, and sometimes even the content refers to, the visual design. Document elements (both the tag and 'information chunk' variety) are placed in the source order according to how easy they are to position in the current visual design. Arguably, we need better browsers that can make the distinction between document content, navigation, and metadata, but isn't it about time we markup document's for the content without refering to the visual design, and separate out the navigation and other stuff a bit more? I'll bite. I'm going to posit a similar question on XML-DEV. I'm working on my own blogging software. While I finish my editor interface, I'm typing out the XML by hand, making up a document format as I go along. Existing formats, like DocBook struck me as overkill, and I wanted something I copy type. For the most part, there's a one to one mapping between my markup and HTML, with one or two important distinctions. An example of this is the quote. When I quote someone on my blog I need more than formatting. I need to give credit and link. Rather than: blockquote p...virtue has never been as respectable as money./p /blockquote Thus: quote credit=Mark Twain title=Innocents Abroad permalink=http://www.twainquotes.com/Virtue.html; text...virtue has never been as respectable as money./text /quote A quote is rendered in my blog as so: http://engrm.com/blogometer/2005/08/05/link-positive.html Quoting is important in blogging, as you'll note in my blog posting, the person I quoted returned to comment. It's part of the social aspect of social networking. In my blogging interface, a quote editor is going to be a special widget. For blogging quoting and linking are currency. -- Alan Gutierrez - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://engrm.com/blogometer/index.html - http://engrm.com/blogometer/rss.2.0.xml ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Hot Topic: HTML design [was Reason for leaving]
Being a bit of an XML newbie, what's the difference between quote credit=Mark Twain title=Innocents Abroad permalink=http://www.twainquotes.com/Virtue.html; text...virtue has never been as respectable as money./text /quote and quote creditMark Twain/credit titleInnocents Abroad/title permalinkhttp://www.twainquotes.com/Virtue.html/permalink text...virtue has never been as respectable as money./text /quote aside from some extra typing, I suppose? On 16/08/05, Alan Gutierrez [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: * Terrence Wood [EMAIL PROTECTED] [2005-08-15 23:52]: Patrick Lauke wrote: Well folks, here's a crazy idea: let's start some good discussions on the principles of web standards then. We need a bit of a catalyst to get things started. Any hot topics anybody's got at the moment? With the recent departure of a member who found this forum boring I thought I'd open up a discussion on html design. First, let me explain what I mean by html design. One of the tenets of web standards design is the separation of content and presentation. The benefits of this are often explained in terms of easy site updates, the ability to change the visual design by simply updating the CSS, and improved accessibility. All good stuff, and increasingly (as we know), web sites are produced where content is on one file (html) and the presentation is in another (CSS) Another idea related to web standards is that of semantic markup, where markup is used to give the document structure - after all, html is a structural language - and the ultimate goal is to create a web that is usable by both machines (semantic web) and people. So, when I use the term html design I am talking about how a web page is marked up, not only in terms of separating presentation and content, but how the document appears without reference to the visual design. By and large html design is not something happening in practice. Documents are marked up, and sometimes even the content refers to, the visual design. Document elements (both the tag and 'information chunk' variety) are placed in the source order according to how easy they are to position in the current visual design. Arguably, we need better browsers that can make the distinction between document content, navigation, and metadata, but isn't it about time we markup document's for the content without refering to the visual design, and separate out the navigation and other stuff a bit more? I'll bite. I'm going to posit a similar question on XML-DEV. I'm working on my own blogging software. While I finish my editor interface, I'm typing out the XML by hand, making up a document format as I go along. Existing formats, like DocBook struck me as overkill, and I wanted something I copy type. For the most part, there's a one to one mapping between my markup and HTML, with one or two important distinctions. An example of this is the quote. When I quote someone on my blog I need more than formatting. I need to give credit and link. Rather than: blockquote p...virtue has never been as respectable as money./p /blockquote Thus: quote credit=Mark Twain title=Innocents Abroad permalink=http://www.twainquotes.com/Virtue.html; text...virtue has never been as respectable as money./text /quote A quote is rendered in my blog as so: http://engrm.com/blogometer/2005/08/05/link-positive.html Quoting is important in blogging, as you'll note in my blog posting, the person I quoted returned to comment. It's part of the social aspect of social networking. In my blogging interface, a quote editor is going to be a special widget. For blogging quoting and linking are currency. -- Alan Gutierrez - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://engrm.com/blogometer/index.html - http://engrm.com/blogometer/rss.2.0.xml ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help ** -- Jason Foss http://www.almost-anything.com.au http://www.waterfallweb.net Windows Messenger: [EMAIL PROTECTED] North Rockhampton, Queensland, Australia ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Hot Topic: HTML design [was Reason for leaving]
* Jason Foss [EMAIL PROTECTED] [2005-08-16 03:36]: Being a bit of an XML newbie, what's the difference between quote credit=Mark Twain title=Innocents Abroad permalink=http://www.twainquotes.com/Virtue.html; text...virtue has never been as respectable as money./text /quote and quote creditMark Twain/credit titleInnocents Abroad/title permalinkhttp://www.twainquotes.com/Virtue.html/permalink text...virtue has never been as respectable as money./text /quote aside from some extra typing, I suppose? In my case, it was a matter of avoiding extra typeing, since I'm typing out those elements in the raw blog XML which I edit by hand for now. That's all. Not a good reason. Or maybe, a good enough reason for now. If I were designing a schema for a quote, I'd probably follow your design, with one caveat. quote creditMark Twain/credit titleInnocents Abroad/title permalinkhttp://www.twainquotes.com/Virtue.html/permalink content text...virtue has never been as respectable as money./text /content /quote Since text is really a block of text, and might better be called para, except that sometimes it's not a paragraph. -- Alan Gutierrez - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://engrm.com/blogometer/index.html - http://engrm.com/blogometer/rss.2.0.xml ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Hot Topic: HTML design [was Reason for leaving]
Patrick Lauke wrote: quote credit=Mark Twain title=Innocents Abroad permalink=http://www.twainquotes.com/Virtue.html; text...virtue has never been as respectable as money./text /quote quote creditMark Twain/credit titleInnocents Abroad/title permalinkhttp://www.twainquotes.com/Virtue.html/permalink text...virtue has never been as respectable as money./text /quote In essence (if you agree with the thoughts in the article) if the piece of information can be seen as core content (rather than metadata) it should be an element, not an attribute. Also, consider the refactoring pain if -- when! -- you might need to increase the granularity of your data -- is: creditMark Twain/credit suddenly needs to be: credit author firstnameMark/firstname lastnameTwain/lastname /author editor firstname.../firstname ... etc. Much easier to work with elements in that case :-) YMMV! -- Hassan Schroeder - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Webtuitive Design === (+1) 408-938-0567 === http://webtuitive.com dream. code. ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Hot Topic: HTML design [was Reason for leaving]
Hassan Schroeder wrote: Also, consider the refactoring pain if -- when! -- you might need to increase the granularity of your data -- is: creditMark Twain/credit suddenly needs to be: credit author firstnameMark/firstname lastnameTwain/lastname /author editor firstname.../firstname ... etc. Much easier to work with elements in that case :-) Absolutely! Attributes really only work for atomic data that you'll never want to split up any further. -- Patrick H. Lauke __ re·dux (adj.): brought back; returned. used postpositively [latin : re-, re- + dux, leader; see duke.] www.splintered.co.uk | www.photographia.co.uk http://redux.deviantart.com __ Web Standards Project (WaSP) Accessibility Task Force http://webstandards.org/ __ ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Hot Topic: HTML design [was Reason for leaving]
Patrick H. Lauke wrote: Hassan Schroeder wrote: Also, consider the refactoring pain if -- when! -- you might need to increase the granularity of your data -- is: creditMark Twain/credit suddenly needs to be: credit author firstnameMark/firstname lastnameTwain/lastname /author editor firstname.../firstname ... etc. Much easier to work with elements in that case :-) Absolutely! Attributes really only work for atomic data that you'll never want to split up any further. thank you guys and gals for this thread. it is putting a lot of things in perspective for me about document structure. too bad brian left, i think he would have appreciated this. dwain -- Dwain Alford [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.alforddesigngroup.com The artist may use any form which his expression demands; for his inner impulse must find suitable expression. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning The Spiritual In Art ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
RE: [WSG] Hot Topic: HTML design [was Reason for leaving]
From: Patrick Lauke http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-eleatt.html (not that it makes the advice any less valuable, but I love how they seem to have some unclosed bold tag there in the markup somewhere...) libIf the information should not be normalized for white space, use elements./b (XML processors normalize attributes in ways that can change the raw text of the attribute value.)b//li -- Peter Williams ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
[WSG] Hot Topic: HTML design [was Reason for leaving]
Patrick Lauke wrote: Well folks, here's a crazy idea: let's start some good discussions on the principles of web standards then. We need a bit of a catalyst to get things started. Any hot topics anybody's got at the moment? With the recent departure of a member who found this forum boring I thought I'd open up a discussion on html design. First, let me explain what I mean by html design. One of the tenets of web standards design is the separation of content and presentation. The benefits of this are often explained in terms of easy site updates, the ability to change the visual design by simply updating the CSS, and improved accessibility. All good stuff, and increasingly (as we know), web sites are produced where content is on one file (html) and the presentation is in another (CSS) Another idea related to web standards is that of semantic markup, where markup is used to give the document structure - after all, html is a structural language - and the ultimate goal is to create a web that is usable by both machines (semantic web) and people. So, when I use the term html design I am talking about how a web page is marked up, not only in terms of separating presentation and content, but how the document appears without reference to the visual design. By and large html design is not something happening in practice. Documents are marked up, and sometimes even the content refers to, the visual design. Document elements (both the tag and 'information chunk' variety) are placed in the source order according to how easy they are to position in the current visual design. Arguably, we need better browsers that can make the distinction between document content, navigation, and metadata, but isn't it about time we markup document's for the content without refering to the visual design, and separate out the navigation and other stuff a bit more? kind regards Terrence Wood. ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
