Re: Whitespace

Bill Janssen (janssen@parc.xerox.com)
Wed, 12 Jan 1994 18:33:02 PST


Excerpts from ext.WorldWideWeb: 12-Jan-94 Re: Whitespace Lou
Montulli@stat1.cc.uk (1652)

> Many people don't care what they mean, they just want to make
> different sections of text look different than other sections
> to help the reader distinquish between different topics or
> meanings.

They'd better not count on that, though. HTML was originally designed
to be universal, which means that browsers for it have been written in
Emacs -- single-font, no type faces, Emacs. I can't see how to write
such a browser for HTML any more. There is no effective way to indicate
alternate-usage (except for some very restricted set of alternate
usages: title, acronym, abbrev, cmd, arg, var -- and even these are
``recommended'' optional roles), so there's no way to know what <em>
really means any more. I guess you'd map every <em>foo</em> to either
"*foo*" or "foo", depending on the role (if any).

The mere fact that the _Physical Styles_ section is still in the HTML+
document is quite distasteful (as is _Inlined Graphics or Icons_, which
should be obsoleted by ``figure'' and/or ``embed''. _Horizontal Rule_
is also a wart that should be removed. I'm not sure yet about _Floating
Panels_, though I don't see why they can't be replaced by ``figure''
and/or ``embed''.

Bill