re: structural vs presentational markup (was 'one word bold')

by "Lois Wakeman" <lois(at)lois.co.uk>

 Date:  Fri, 17 Aug 2001 09:26:42 +0100
 To:  "HWG techniques" <hwg-techniques(at)mail.hwg.org>
  todo: View Thread, Original
>That's all well and good, but if HTML was really designed to define what
something IS and not what it LOOKS LIKE, then clearly HTML contradicts
itself if tags such as <b> and <i> were created in the first place.
<

This is exactly true - and one of the reasons why there are deprecated
presentational tags, and CSS, in the latest standards from W3C - an attempt
to separate the two properly as was originally envisaged, I guess, by Tim
Berners-Lee et al, but quickly diluted because people worried about
appearance and there was no proper mechanism to specify it. Now there is :-)

CSS, we can only hope, will eventually remove the need for all the
proprietary NS and MS extensions to the standards, font tag bloat, different
versions of pages for different browsers, complex tables and single-pixel
GIF kludges etc.

(But don't hope for it *too* soon, or we'll all be out of a job because then
anyone can make a good-looking web page. OTOH, DTP has been around for many
years now, and we haven't all evolved into expert typographers, so perhaps
there is hope <GG>.)

Kind regards,

Lois Wakeman

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