don said:
but they are inherently unsemantic
again, you have confused "semantic" with "explicitly tagged". human beings follow relatively simple rules to endow meaning. so it's silly to think we can't program computers to do the same. it's totally unnecessary to tag a section as "table of contents", when we can easily code a routine that can recognize it readily. and if you include the word "chapter" in each chapter-header, which you should, so you will get an automatic deep-link to it, it's quite easy to write the code that leverages that knowledge. again, stop treating computers as if they are some simple idiots that need to have every single bit of minutia explained for them.
so getting people to restrict themselves to marking up a master text with only semantic tags will be difficult.
don't waste the time and energy of human beings by having them engage in the stupid task of applying tags.
2. Similarly, I find it helpful to have an easy visual distinction between structural markup and presentation markup.
i find it helpful to avoid the need for "mark-up" entirely.
3. Also, since it's only divs and spans, the markup tends to become verbose and obscure pretty quickly, with a lot of noise to the signal.
again, you don't need it.
4. And consequently marked-up XHTML is less transparent when you want to see only the text.
not when you have the markup applied automatically, after-the-fact, solely for feeding it to a web-browser that's programmed as a dumb-and-blind rule-follower. but if you think those brutes are gonna avoid extinction, you certainly don't have a very good handle on the future. google is gonna blow your socks off... -bowerbird