Re: question and answer, style guide?
Edward Vielmetti <emv@garnet.msen.com>
Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1992 10:37:06 -0500 (EST)
From: Edward Vielmetti <emv@garnet.msen.com>
Subject: Re: question and answer, style guide?
To: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@www3.cern.ch>
Cc: Robert Raisch <raisch@cthulhu.control.com>, www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
In-reply-to: <9211031230.AA01398@www3.cern.ch>
Message-id: <Pine.3.05.9211031003.A20803-b100000@garnet.msen.com>
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(c) is arguable from a design point of view. however, since we're dealing
with structured text, it should be possible to structure a document (with
some labor) so that it looks useful in both contexts.
as to (b), the only useful definition of a tag that I have is how it shows
up on the screen.
my biggest argument is for (a). or more precisely, for tags that are less
of a strict descriptive markup and more of a functional or structural
markup, so that I could mark things up as <question> ... </question> and
<answer> ... </answer> and then go later and define what those mean as far
as on screen presentation. ideally this might lead to full support for
SGML and DTDs and all of those heavy-weight but powerful constructs.
the real answer might be "edit in a real SGML environment, then edit the
tags so they work with HTML browsers". in that case what I'm really
asking for is design for a frequently asked questions DTD, and I'm
(currently) sorely lacking the tools needed to experiment my way to an answer.
On Tue, 3 Nov 1992, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
> (a) you need more variety of tags, or that
> (b) the 24x80 representation of the existing tags is suboptimal, or that
> (c) the task is impossible by its nature -- you must rewritethe document.