Re: Apple Browser

[CUTblakeney@home.com (Jeff Blakeney)]

On Sat, 08 Jan 2000 21:00:31 GMT, stevementzer@earthlink.net (Steven
W. Mentzer) wrote:

>Geez, what spec did you work from?... <B> <I> <U> have existed as long as I can 
>remember... :)

I'm not sure when they were introduced.  It might have been as early
as HTML 2.0 or as late as HTML 3.2.  If I remember correctly, they
were unofficial tags added to some web browser and were adopted into
the official specs later.  Even when they were added, the purist HTML
authors frowned on the use of these literal tags and urged people to
continue to use the descriptive tags.

The original intent for HTML, which is probably why I dislike it, is
as a page "description" language.  You are describing the page
contents and letting the renderer figure out exactly how they want it
displayed.  This is part of what lead to the "Best viewed with <web
browser name>" stuff as web pages would look completely different when
viewed with Lynx, Mosaic, Netscape, Internet Explorer or whatever.
Even today this can still be a problem.

I would have much rather had a file "format" instead of a page
description language.  A way that you could do proper page layout and
the renderer would just do the best job it could to display the page
as it was designed.  It would still look slightly different in
different browsers as text screens can't change their font or font
size and other things but I still think it would have ended up being a
better way to go.  It would have also reduced the size of web page
documents as HTML tags take up a lot of characters and if you do any
formatting of the HTML source to make it easier to edit later, you end
up increasing the size even more.

However, it is far too late to change now.

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