Re: simple HTML list considered harmful
Dave_Raggett <dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
From: Dave_Raggett <dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
Message-id: <9309291523.AA23174@manuel.hpl.hp.com>
Subject: Re: simple HTML list considered harmful
To: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 93 16:23:56 BST
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Mailer: Elm [revision: 66.36.1.1]
Marc writes,
> My objection is that people (real people -- users, authors, ...)
> almost invariably think in terms of line breaks, not line beginnings.
> Similarly paragraph breaks, not paragraph beginnings. All (?) other
> document processing systems (TeX, Microsoft Word, ...) hold to these
> models. Sure, you begin sections and you begin chapters and you begin
> blockquoted regions, but paragraphs and lines are such a low-level and
> intrinsic part of the concept and practice of text that it seems far
> more natural to think in terms of breaks, as usual.
Defining <P> and <BR> as separators means you can't treat them as
containers. This means you can't tag a paragraph/line with an identifier
or rendering attributes such as alignment.
Quite a few people have asked for <P> as a container and most word
processing applications use a container model. The paragraph symbol is
only present as a GUI handle for merging paragraphs. There seems to be a
growing feeling that many authors will create and maintain documents in a
richer format and convert to HTML/HTML+ for delivery to the Web. Having <P>
as a container is much closer to existing formats and will preserve more
information than as a separator. Its a pain that SGML has no mechanism
for postfix operators!
Most authors won't notice the difference so long as browsers don't require a
leading <P> and ensure that a <P> after a header has no effect on spacing.
Dave