John Hagerson wrote:
Thank you very much Jon and Andrew. Between the samples listed, the cookbook, and the other resources noted on the PG wiki, I think I will be able to mark up the text I'm working on. I need to think more of semantic tags rather than presentation tags. There is a gestalt to this that I haven't quite mastered.
Glad to have been of help. My call for alternate style sheets for my version of "My Antonia" is possible only because the markup is strictly structural/semantic. Had I done old-fashioned HTML markup (where I mix in presentational tags along with the structural/semantic tags), it is no longer possible to have the flexibility of presentation. (It's also important NOT to use tables for layout purposes.) An interesting site which demonstrates the full power of CSS and the separation of presentation from structure is the CSS Zen Garden site: http://www.csszengarden.com/ where the same XHTML 1.0 Strict document (well essentially the same with respect to structural/semantic markup) is presented in hundreds of different ways solely by swapping the CSS style sheet (background images are also customized and applied using CSS). It's amazing what can be done with CSS applied to purely structural/semantic markup. Another important aspect of having structural/semantic-only markup is accessibility. Such documents have a high degree of accessibility (again, it is important NOT to use table markup for layout purposes if one wants maximal accessibility -- CSS Zen Garden shows that tables are not necessary for complex layouts.) A while back I did some XHTML markup on the "We Media" document for JD Lasica and the OurMedia project. I asked the CSS authoring community for alternate CSS style sheets for that document. Two people supplied CSS: http://www.openreader.org/wemedia/ (I like Bob's a little better. Note how readable the document is even without CSS, which is accomplished by proper XHTML markup.) Jon Noring