Re: color text?

Terry Allen (terry@ora.com)
Wed, 3 May 95 19:55:12 EDT

Lou, re Gavin, I think:
| > The above goes against a fundamental tenet of SGML (and after a long
| > painful period of debate, HTML), which is that the data should be as
| > independent as possible from style information.
|
| Oh please, not this again. Stop trying to invent fundamental tenets
| that don't exist. SGML is a syntactical language than can express
| formatting equally as well as content based markup. Trying to claim
| SGML as a "content" only language is an outright lie.

Lou is right. Nothing in 8879 supports any of the mythos of SGML.
However, the reason Gavin cites is valid independently of the
bogus justification he gives it. In short, viewing the text
as structured, and layering the rendering info on top of the
structure, is more powerful and flexible than packed both into
a single representation.

The more rendering info you try to put in the markup, the closer
and closer you'll get to RTF.

-- 
Terry Allen  (terry@ora.com)   O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
Editor, Digital Media Group    101 Morris St.
			       Sebastopol, Calif., 95472
occasional column at:  http://gnn.com/meta/imedia/webworks/allen/

A Davenport Group sponsor. For information on the Davenport Group see ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/davenport/README.html or http://www.ora.com/davenport/README.html