On 2/9/06, Stephen Stagg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > This is not meaningless, It is more readable than HTML, to a human. And > when computers start to need to read websites automatically...
Humans read content, computers read markup. Humans don't read HTML (excusing, perhaps, the rare breed that inhabit this list and certain other niches of the web) for its semantics, relying instead on visual/aural cues to determine the importance of content. Markup is for computers. Computers need to read websites automatically today... search engine, anyone? RSS/Atom auto-discovery in modern browsers? Copying and pasting semantic web content as rich text into another application? (If you're doing it all with CSS, the default "styles" of elements are often inherited... with non-(machine-defined)-semantic markup this isn't possible). It IS meaningless for all intents and purposes. Consider a plain text document: humans make a distinction between types of content, computers do not... hence markup. Admittedly, we also use markup to provide communication cues... but that's ancillary to the core of it. Unpopular though this idea may be, web standards (recommendations, whatever) are actually about ensuring that User Agents can do something meaningful with what they're handed. It's the User Agent's job to communicate that to the actual user... so we're catering for machines, not humans. Josh ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
