Re: Lost in spaces

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Message-id: <Yg7UJSwB0KGWJgehE0@holmes.parc.xerox.com>
Date: 	Tue, 15 Jun 1993 10:22:38 PDT
Sender: Bill Janssen <janssen@parc.xerox.com>
From: Bill Janssen <janssen@parc.xerox.com>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch, tom@begbick.law.cornell.edu (Thomas R. Bruce)
Subject: Re: Lost in spaces
In-reply-to: <9306150221.AA04581@begbick.law.cornell.edu.law.cornell.edu>
References: <9306150221.AA04581@begbick.law.cornell.edu.law.cornell.edu>

Excerpts from ext.WorldWideWeb: 14-Jun-93 Lost in spaces Thomas R.
Bruce@begbick. (2359)

> I agree that bastardizing standards is a rotten idea and in
> the long run complicates implementors' lives a little, maybe.  Just
> maybe. But something as inherently counterintuitive as taking all
> control over whitespace away from an author -- or allowing them to
> retain it by creating a tagset the size of the Manhattan phone book --
> sure isn't going to put a lot of docs on the Web very quickly,
> whatever it may do for the purity of the standard.

I'm not arguing that authors shouldn't have control over the
presentation of their material, merely that they shouldn't have this
control *in HTML*.  There are plenty of markup formats which allow this
kind of thing; there's no need to add it to HTML.  There's also no
reason docs "on the Web" have to be in HTML -- if there's a better
format, use it!  This allows us to avoid the "rotten idea".

Bill