RE: draft-ietf-html-style-00.txt & class as a general selector

David Seibert (seibert@hep.physics.mcgill.ca)
Fri, 8 Dec 1995 12:21:37 -0500 (EST)


On Fri, 8 Dec 1995, Chris Wilson (PSD) wrote:

> Chris Lilley wrote:
> >If it is affected for no reason .... then why on earth should HTML be
> extended
> >to cope with formatting changes that occur for no reason?
>
> I believe he meant content- or document structure-based reason. Obviously,
> there is a reason - you want the style to change at that point.

Does anyone have an example of a reason for any style that is *not* based
on either the content or the document structure, besides Chris Lilley's
example of ransom note (see below). I certainly can't think of one - why
emphasize a certain piece of text if the content of that particular
piece isn't particularly important, unless it helps to clarify the
document structure?

> >Lets be clear here: a change to HTML hs been proposed so it can
> >do *ransom notes* ? Given the goals of HTML this is clearly nonsense.
>
> Where did "ransom notes" come from? Let's try to keep the discussion on
> track...

"Ransom notes" makes perfect sense to me - when you write a ransom note,
you want to randomize your style to make it hard to identify the author.
Think of the visual cliche: the ransom note that is written by cutting
individual words (or letters) out of a large collection of magazines and
newspapers, and then pasting them onto a sheet of paper. Do you want to
encourage people to write html like that?

David

Work: seibert@hep.physics.mcgill.ca Home: 6420 36th Ave.
Physics Department, McGill University Montreal, PQ, H1T 2Z5
3600 Univ. St., Mtl., PQ, H3A 2T8, Canada Canada
(514) 398-6496; FAX: (514) 398-3733 (514) 255-5965