HI Lee, I believe we basically, agree that the use of "less" complex markup is the way to go. What I have come to realize is that we do have a problem about terms. what you mostly call semantic, I still put in the realm of syntax as a linguist, or better express as a computer linguist. You see poem, verse, stanza and line are first and foremost syntactic. Naturally, they carry semantic meaning in there labels. Yet, no where are these objects being used to do any "semantic" analysis of of text. I can fully understand your dislike of my approach, because the lines of a poem are not paragraphs. Yet, if I disregard the intended use of paragraphs and say that by using style/class elements I make the these paragraphs formally to lines of a poem. The user agent could care less. It just renders the markup. It is the result that matters. Or, have you not used a wrench as a hammer, a screw driver as a chisel? Sometimes, it is practical to "misuse" tools or here markup. regards Keith. Am 24.02.2012 um 20:44 schrieb Lee Passey:
On Fri, February 24, 2012 1:50 am, Keith J. Schultz wrote:
HI Lee,
Your continuous references to reading devices is interesting.
It shows one very important point that the HTML-standard is not well implemented or not fully implemented on such devices.
What it does show is that using complex style of mark-up (semantic mark-up) is a very bad idea!
No, it demonstrates that /relying/ on a complex style of mark-up is a very bad idea. But if you can create markup that looks good in a simple User Agent, and looks even better in a more powerful User Agent why wouldn't you do that?
You don't want to make a document that looks crude even in the most powerful of environments, and you don't want to create a document that loses its formatting in a simple environment. But this is not a zero sum game -- you don't have to choose one or the other. Start with basic formatting for a User Agent that doesn't recognize CSS. Do the best job you can, recognizing that it won't be perfect. Now classify the markup (in HTML, classification involves adding 'class' attributes to elements) so that by adding a style sheet the presentation is improved. Be careful just to add class attributes, not to change any elements.
What you have then is a win-win! Why would you want to penalize any group of users?
In order to achieve a better visual presentation it would be more appropriate to use just <p>.
No it is not, because paragraphs carry semantic baggage that you want to avoid.
Try this experiment:
Mark up a poem using <p> elements (no styles allowed). Look at the document in a browser; is it acceptable?
Now look at the same poem on a User Agent that displays paragraphs indented. All good e-book readers, devices or software, will allow you to set the indentation of paragraphs: make it 50% or 25em, or some other really large value. How does your poem look now?
(If you don't have a good e-book reader, you can simulate this by putting:
<style type="text/css"> p { text-indent: 50% > </style>
in the <head> element of your document, and then using a modern browser).
Now try the same experiment again with <div> instead of <p>. How does that change the results?
Yes, using basic markup is good, but you must always use markup that matches the semantics of what you're marking. And you should never disallow styles that makes the basic markup even better.
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