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This page (revision-8) was last changed on 16-Mar-2007 16:10 by 83.18.142.106  

This page was created on 02-Jan-2007 02:15 by RadomirDopieralski

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At line 66 added 12 lines
I certainly agree that presentation markup can be very sophisticated, and that doing it well takes knowledge and skill. Things like proper use of small caps, letterspacing, and so on are the staples of book design, but generally beyond what can be expected on the Web.
My point is that you can expect a lower amount of brokenness if you put a simple, basic set of presentational markup tools into the hands of users than if you give them, say, the semantic-flavored tag subset of XHTML. Evidence in support of my assertion is the fairly high degree of brokenness visible in the (X)HTML that's out there, even among strong proponents of semantic markup.
I think that indentation is an important presentation style. Evidence in support of this assertion is its extremely widespread use in a large variety of contexts, including in books, in wikis, and on the web in general. As with most presentation elements, there are a variety of semantic meanings that it can indicate, obviously including block quotations, verse quotations, nesting level within thread-mode discussions (including the very common pattern of indented answer to unindented question), data definition within a definition list, presentation of examples, and, often, just a visual effect without a specific meaning other than to break up monotony or loosely group content.
If you want to mark all this stuff up semantically, then you have to provide distinct tags for each of these uses. Even (X)HTML doesn't really try to do this, so doing it here would violate NotNew rather egregiously. And, if you provide a tag for just one of these semantic meanings, it is guaranteed to be used for the others to achieve the desired presentation effect.
I just took a serious look at [Crossmark], the OLPC markup language, and see that it generally has a bit more of a semantic flavor than the typical Wiki markup, including cite metadata within a "quote" macro tag. That said, it includes indentation and uses whitespace in the source to indicate it. Radomir, have you looked at Crossmark? I think you might like it.
-- RaphLevien, 2007-01-09
Version Date Modified Size Author Changes ... Change note
8 16-Mar-2007 16:10 14.269 kB 83.18.142.106 to previous added link to a w3c article
7 10-Jan-2007 01:32 14.143 kB RadomirDopieralski to previous | to last not semantic/presentational, just useful
6 09-Jan-2007 23:15 10.03 kB RaphLevien to previous | to last indented markup and Crossmark
5 08-Jan-2007 15:54 7.913 kB RadomirDopieralski to previous | to last "presentational markup is easier" argument is simply wrong
4 08-Jan-2007 07:34 7.04 kB Christoph to previous | to last XHTML rendering should be left to the implementor
3 08-Jan-2007 05:34 6.861 kB RaphLevien to previous | to last response to Radomir
2 02-Jan-2007 02:16 5.746 kB RadomirDopieralski to previous | to last rantitty rant
1 02-Jan-2007 02:15 5.746 kB RadomirDopieralski to last even more ranting
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