Re: RE dtd2.html

Tony Sanders (sanders@bsdi.com)
Thu, 27 May 1993 13:44:37 -0500

In-reply-to: Bill Janssen's message of Thu, 27 May 93 10:41:55 PDT.
> Excerpts from ext.WorldWideWeb: 27-May-93 Re: RE dtd2.html
> Dave_Raggett@hplb.hpl.hp (3410)
> > > + I am not sure that STRONG, B, I, and U are desirable as
> > > elements. These formatting characteristics ought to
> > I don't like them either. They are present in HTML to support
> > importing (scanned) documents for which a filter has no way of deciding
> > the original meaning.
> This justification doesn't sound terribly good. If we can't infer the
> meaning of the font changes, perhaps translating the scanned document to
> HTML is inappropriate; perhaps the scanned document should be stored in
> TeX or Postscript or GIF, depending on what other image characteristics
> of the document seem important. Or perhaps the font change information
> should simply be discarded on conversion to HTML, as it does not
> translate to meaning.

I use them for preserving man page formatting _^HX_^HY_^HZ gets translated
to <I>XYZ</I>. If you don't like them and believe they are void of content
then simply ignore them in your browser. I believe that since HTML is
more of a delivery vechicle than a formal markup language they are required
because HTML cannot be all things to all people. I VERY much agree that
tags should be semantic but in a delivery format I think you need to leave
a little room for slop.

If you remove <I> and <B> what will happen instead of using TeX or whatever
people will use stuff like <CITE> (or whatever formats nice in their browser)
where it is inappropriate (assuming you removed <EM> and <STRONG> for
the same reasons).

If you resort to an external format how are you going to deal with hypertext
links? I may not be able to figure out why foo was in italics but I can
sure as heck generate a hypertext link to man pages from text like
``foo(1)''.

--sanders