Re: Apple Browser

[wbdesnoy@acs2.acs.ucalgary.ca (Byron Desnoyers Winmill)]

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

: ><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.  

I think that the idea behind the original HTML specifications was that the
author is supposed to ignore formatting, and break up the content into
logical blocks.  The software then decides what to do with those logical
blocks.

Using logical rather than literal tags allows browsers like Lynx decide
what to do with text which would normally be displayed in bold or italics
or underline, even when the terminal does not support those capabilities.
The use of logical tags allows for this since it tells the computer what
type of information to convey, not *how* to convey that information.

Logical tags also avoid many of the problems which arise from changing
or broken standards.  In otherwords, if some version of HTML supported a
feature which allowed the designer to position a block of text as they
pleased, and the prior version did not support that feature, the output
on older browsers would not make sense.  (Which is why word processing
tend not to be compatible between version, as with true page description
languages like PostScript or PDF.  It is also why I can fire up a really
old browser, like Mosiac, and expect to be able to see most of the content
-- using HTML.)

I'm sorry Jeff, but literal tags are a Bad Thing for the Apple II community.
(Though I do agree that a preprocessed version of HTML would cut back on
the amount of data being shuttled back and forth on the internet, and would
allow older computers to render documents much faster.)

--
Stopped (SIGTTOU)         byron.
$

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