I agree that this is something of a hack.
But the market is demanding presentational control. They're willing
to sacrifice document structure for it, in many cases.
> So I'd tweak the syntax to have a prefix,
>maybe something like "<?DL (...)>"
OK. This motion has been made and now seconded. I was gonna put
it in the original proposal, but I omitted it for clarity... or something.
Anyway... this is clearly a good idea.
>More importantly,
>The processing model will be considerably simpler if you put
>the PI right *after* the start-tag, not before: that way it exists
>at the scope to which it applies.
Now that I think about it, this is simpler.
>The biggest problem I see with this is that it might possibly
>encourage "tag abuse syndrome" (Dave Raggett's term, I think?)
>rather than discourage it as intended. People could use no tags
>but <html>...</html> and do everything with flat PIs -- gak!
They will do whatever causes them the least pain and hassle. I hope
that browsers will become more picky about element structure (i.e. I
hope they'll support less non-conforming stuff). But no browser
implementor is going to make it impossible to do stuff that Mosaic
does currently. So processing instructions can fill the gap.
I wager that it will be simpler in _most_ cases to use tags
than PIs. Consider:
<?DL (space-before: 2x font-size: 24pt font-weight: 'bold)>
A Heading
<?DL (space-before: 1x font-size: 12pt font-weight: 'medium
start-indent: 3em end-indent: 3em)>
First paragraph
vs.
<H1>A Heading</h1>
<p> First Paragraph
The only time I could imagine seeing the former is from some
RTF-to-SGML converter that just transliterated the presentation info.
Dan