[MacDV] Re: Safari pros and Cons!

[Steven Rogers]

On Wednesday, January 8, 2003, at 12:37 PM, Erica Sadun wrote:

>> On Wednesday, January 8, 2003, at 12:02 PM, Erica Sadun wrote:
>>
>>> The whole point of the way markup languages were specified was to 
>>> allow each browser to have control over the output of the 
>>> description. This, I always felt, was amazingly stupid. Time has (I 
>>> believe) proved me right.
>>
>> Its actually more directed at conceptually separating the content 
>> from specifics of display to make it portable. The viewer gets to 
>> specify things like what <BOLD> is, but that's not really the key 
>> motivation. The primary motivator is to create an abstract idea of 
>> presentation that makes the content look fairly good across a lot of 
>> devices with different sizes and capabilities. Its not as dumb as it 
>> looks on the surface.
>
> quoting:
>
> Unlike other common document file formats that represent both content 
> and presentation, SGML represents a document's content data and 
> structure (interrelationships among the data). Removing the 
> presentation from content establishes a neutral format. SGML documents 
> and the information in them can easily be re-used by publishing and 
> non-publishing applications.
>
> /quoting
>
> (Baby in other arm--sorry about brevity/typos)
>
> Presentation *NOT* part of markup lang philosophy.

They're using "structure" to refer to what I called "abstract 
presentation" - whatever you want to call things like the difference 
between bold and non-bold text, the point still remains:  the primary 
motivation is not to put control of what <BOLD> does in the user's 
hands. Its to separate the content and some abstract layout concepts 
from the specifics of presentation.

SR