Re: Whitespace

Bill Janssen <janssen@parc.xerox.com>

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Message-id: <YhB==S4B0KGW03caQU@holmes.parc.xerox.com>
Date: 	Wed, 12 Jan 1994 18:33:02 PST
Sender: Bill Janssen <janssen@parc.xerox.com>
From: Bill Janssen <janssen@parc.xerox.com>
To: janssen@parc.xerox.com (Bill Janssen),
        montulli@stat1.cc.ukans.edu (Lou Montulli)
Subject: Re: Whitespace
Cc: www-talk@www0.cern.ch
In-reply-to: <9401130203.AA38308@stat1.cc.ukans.edu>
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Excerpts from ext.WorldWideWeb: 12-Jan-94 Re: Whitespace Lou
Montulli@stat1.cc.uk (1652)

> Many people don't care what they mean, they just want to make
> different sections of text look different than other sections
> to help the reader distinquish between different topics or
> meanings.

They'd better not count on that, though.  HTML was originally designed
to be universal, which means that browsers for it have been written in
Emacs -- single-font, no type faces, Emacs.  I can't see how to write
such a browser for HTML any more.  There is no effective way to indicate
alternate-usage (except for some very restricted set of alternate
usages:  title, acronym, abbrev, cmd, arg, var -- and even these are
``recommended'' optional roles), so there's no way to know what <em>
really means any more.  I guess you'd map every <em>foo</em> to either
"*foo*" or "foo", depending on the role (if any).

The mere fact that the _Physical Styles_ section is still in the HTML+
document is quite distasteful (as is _Inlined Graphics or Icons_, which
should be obsoleted by ``figure'' and/or ``embed''.  _Horizontal Rule_ 
is also a wart that should be removed.  I'm not sure yet about _Floating
Panels_, though I don't see why they can't be replaced by ``figure''
and/or ``embed''.

Bill