|> > A generic character-level text container tag in HTML 3.0 would be
|> > extremely useful for applying styles to certain blocks of text. I propose
|> > the following tag:
|> >
|> > <TEXT>...</TEXT>
|>
|>This would be very useful indeed, and will talk to Dave Raggett about
|>it.
|This seems similar in intent to the <C> tag that I propsed in my character
|formatting proposal (With the obvious addition of style sheet information).
|
|Is that correct? What are the relative merrits of calling it <C> (character)
|vs. <TEXT>?
The difference is that TEXT doesn't imply any formatting, which is
indicated by the fact that it will have just 3 attributes: ID (to make
it into a target anchor), LANG (to declare the content to be in a
certain language), and CLASS.
Of these, CLASS is the one that is important, since it allows people
to create new elements at will, without it having any effect on
applications that don't know the new element. For example, I can add
tags for CITY, PERSON, DATE, INSTRUCTION, EVENT, NUMBER, etc., simply
by using <TEXT CLASS=CITY>, <TEXT CLASS=PERSON>, etc. Some
applications would do special things with this information, others
would simply recognize it as legal HTML but subsequently ignore it.
A browser that supported style sheets could be instructed to render
this info in a certain way:
TEXT[CLASS=CITY]: text.color = green
TEXT[CLASS=PERSON]: text.style = small-caps
etc.
In other words, <C> is meant to replace style sheets, <TEXT> is meant
to introduce semantics. That it can also be used to add extra styles
is just a coincidence. In that respect TEXT is redundant, since one
could just as well use <EM CLASS=CITY> for that.
I'm interested to see how Paul Prescod can use entities for the same
function, but I already have one important objection: the use of
entities requires the UA to parse the document subset. I like to keep
UAs simple, so that it is still possible for an individual to write a
useful Web browser for HTML and (a subset of) SGML. See
<http://www.let.rug.nl/~bert/Stylesheets/SGML-Lite.html>; I'll post
more about it later.
Bert
--
Bert Bos Alfa-informatica
<bert@let.rug.nl> Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
<http://www.let.rug.nl/~bert/> Postbus 716, NL-9700 AS GRONINGEN