Re: <fontsize>

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Date: Mon, 10 Jan 1994 17:02:55 +0000 (WET)
From: Liam Relihan <relihanl@ul.ie>
Subject: Re: <fontsize>
To: www-talk@www0.cern.ch
In-reply-to: <199401101647.IAA27401@mail.netcom.com>
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On Mon, 10 Jan 1994, David Koblas wrote:

> > Perhaps we should define a <fontsize [1-6]> tag, instead of the <h> tags.
> 
> It would be nice, since just today I wanted to do:
>         <UL>
>         <LI><h1><A HREF=...>Some Text</A></h1>
>         <LI> ...
> The results were not what I was expecting, it does appear funny at times
> that there is no way to vary the point size.  If there was then <H?> tags
> would just become <P><em size=?>...<em size=?><P>.

This might be nice but I reckon that the whole point of something like
HTML is to define a *document type*. This means logical components that
can be arranged in an aggregation hierarchy. Logical components are a good
thing because they reflect something in the real world and can be
interpreted at a later stage according to the capabilities of the
local rendition software. By encoding things like fonts into documents,
you are immediately creating problems for browsers that can't handle fonts,
etc.

> Additionally, though I'm sure this really is beyond HTML+ (is it?), it 
> would occasionally be nice to specify the COLOR of text and HR lines. 
> This is partly motivated out of recently noticing a lot of documents 
> with images for hrules just to make the documents a little more snazzy.
>         <em color=red>
>         <hr color=red>

Any number of extra codes can be added to HTML/HTML+. However, it is up to
browsers to use those codes and as already hinted at, some browsers have
limited display capabilities.

I believe that certain markups such as <B> and <I> are already destined
for the hatchet and the use of <EM> and <STRONG> will be encouraged
instead. This is good since browsers can treat the more logical <EM> and
<STRONG> according to their capabilities at a local level.

The moral of the story is:
"You can map logical markup into font sizes, colours, etc. easily
- but- 
it is very difficult to map font sizes, colours, etc into logical markup"

Liam


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