Janet wrote:
Andrew asked:
I'm putting the finishing touches on a book for PG. There will be an html file made as well as plain text. This book includes a decent amount of quoted letters and other documents in it. Fairly often, there are headers and/or footers to these which are aligned to be close to the right margin.
So I made a simple CSS declaration for these:
.dateheader {text-align: right; margin-right:2em;}
However, as I progressed through, the name "dateheader" began to seem little inaccurate. The content is also sometimes the name of a place or a person, or a brief phrase.
I suggest .alignright
Also useful for signatures. (I actually use .ar -- I like short and easy to type.)
In some ways simply following visual presentation in the markup makes life a whole lot easier. <laugh/> On the other hand, if the purpose of the markup is to semantically identify what a piece of text is (such as a date, or an addressee), then using class values which are presentation-agnostic is preferred. To a blind person, visual layout, especially when the visual layout is NOT communicated to them, is meaningless. For most of us gifted with good eyesight, we sort of take it for granted that typographic layout is usually intended to visually communicate the structure of documents and the semantics of content. Without such visual layout (that is, when the content is scrunched into a steady stream of look-alike words like Greek was written at the time of Christ), it is a lot harder for the reader to discern things such as "this is a header to a new section", "this is a new chapter", etc. Tyopgraphic layout conventions do vary from era to era and from country to country. They even vary in the same era/country. People are pretty good at figuring out the structures/semantics associated with particular typographic conventions in a book given to them, provided they can understand the language. It gets a lot tougher if one does not know the language, obviously! (Or the book uses a typographic convention they know well.) In addition, when we markup the structure and semantics of content, the content is much easier to repurpose, such as to visually present it per the typographic conventions the reader prefers, or is used to. The content is much more flexible with regards to reflowing and adapting to other conventions (and to adapt to electronic reading systems as well which is one reason why PDF is so despised since it does NOT adapt to the end-user's hardware limitations.) And of course this should improve accessibility (text-to-speech), especially if a standardized markup vocabulary is used which focuses strictly on structure and semantics, such as a tight subset of TEI (as Sebastian Rahz advocates), the Digital Talking Book standard, and others. Jon Noring