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| Radomir challenges: ''now go ask a random teenager''. |
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| I am not sure what point exactly you're trying to make here. Are you suggesting that a random teenager has more than a snowball's chance in hell of typing correct semantic markup into the Web? That there are any plausible scenarios where people ignorant of the typographic traditions will somehow get the semantic markup right? |
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| I agree with your sum-up. I am certainly not arguing that Wiki markup should be considered to be purely presentational. I am absolutely in favor of the ideal of empowering users to make their markup more semantically meaningful. I just do not believe that Wikis are the best place to make that happen, and that attempts to push it are likely to backfire. |
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| After some thought, I now feel that the exact XHTML rendering for, say, slashes and stars should be left to the implementor. <i> and <b> are perfectly reasonable, as are <em> and <strong> (which as [Jukka points out|http://www.cs.tut.fi/%7Ejkorpela/html/em.html] are in practice little more than aliases for the old-school HTML tags). |
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| -- [Raph Levien] 2007-01-07 |
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| ''I now feel that the exact XHTML rendering for, say, slashes and stars should be left to the implementor'' - I absolutely agree with that . |
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| -- [Christoph Sauer] 2007-01-08 |
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| I also agree in case of the emphasis -- I have it on my home page since I've seen it proposed. But I don't think we can solve this in general -- each and every case requires attention separately, and generalizing articles like this one have little sense. |
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| My point about teenager is that no matter whether the markup is semantic or presentational, you still need knowledge and skill to use it. Even more knowledge and skill with the presentational markup, in fact. Semantic markup at least makes it consistent. So the "presentational markup is easier" argument is simply wrong. |
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| Introducing a presentational markup for indentation (because that's what triggered writing this article) doesn't solve the problem with inline and block quotes -- and in addition, introduces additional confusion between block quotes and indentation. |
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| -- RadomirDopieralski, 2007-01-08 |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| -- RaphLevien, 2007-01-09 |
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| Yes, I've been following the Crossmark's development, if you check th news items on this wiki you will see that the development of Creole and Crossmark was supposed to be somehow related -- we never heard from them anymore. |
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| Crossmark has one incredibly powerful feature that is unavailable (by design decission) in Creole -- the macros. They allow you to add practically any semantic or presentational markup you might ever need. They are language-specific though (spoken language, not programming). |
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| Matthew Paul Thomas has some very good advices, unfortuantelly he only talks about __using__ presentational markup together with the semantic one, not about __removing__ the semantic markup. Parts are presentational, parts are semantic. It's not always true that the presentational markup is easier. |
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| Consider the inline quoting. There is a dozen ways to mark quotes, including italics and small-caps and whatnot. There are compicated punctuation rules regarding quoting, most of them language-dependent. Most of the quoting characters aren't even available on any keyboards -- I think it's reasonable to provide markup for them, as well as for the dashes. But you'd need a dozen of them supported if you wanted to go presentational -- and run into issues described on the SmartyPants page. Going semantic here saves a lot of trouble. |
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| I've been doing some thinking on the subject (no kidding!) and I must say that most of the discussion we had here feels pretty stupid. I must admit that my lines sound more stupid, though ;) It seems like the whole presentation/semantic divide is irrelevant for Creole. [http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/contentPresentation-26.html|It's artifical anyways.] HTML and XHTML can define "presentational" markup becuase they have the style sheets to support them, you can say "anything that can be handled with css is presentation". And it's as good a definition as any other. Wiki markup can't afford this -- you can't split your message into repeatable styling and unique content, you need to put it whole into wiki markup, because there is no other way you can express it. The whole message, semantics and presentation included, must be there, leaving any of the parts (no matter how you make the division) will cripple the message. |
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| So here's my position, which, incidentally, have been included as the very second of the [Goals]: ''Cover the common things people need.'' |
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| This means, have the terms that people actually understand and use. I'm not a native speaker, so I can't say whether "stressed", "strong" and "emphasized" is more common than "italic", "bold" or "underlined" (ok, the last one is probably pretty popular, but we don't want to promote it). I can, however, bet, that "lower left double curly quotation mark" is less known than "quote". I probably got the order wrong myself. |
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| Thus, lets have "lists" together with "indented paragraphs", let's have "headings" together with "preformatted text", but let's use "separator" not "horizontal line", and explicit line breaks, not "center with spaces". |
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| By the way, numbered list is a sore thumb here. From what I can see, people prefer to write 1., 2., 3. or a), b), c) manually. Sure, you can argue that numbered lists give you the power of autonumbering -- but you really don't want that if you want to refer to the points later on -- especially without a "reference" markup. And if you don't want to refer -- why use ordered list at all? Yes, I know, most wikis have markup for ordered lists (copied blindly from html) and we want to be compatible. I can live with that :) |
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| So, to sum up one more of my boring rants -- in the context in which this discussion was started: I agree that markup for indenting is useful and we can (should) include it. I'm still missing markup for inline quoting. I don't much care how we call the emphasis, but I'd rather not replace the bullet list markup with just bullets "•" and newlines. We don't need 5 different tags for various kinds of quotes, although specific wiki engines should be free to use them when needed. |
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| -- RadomirDopieralski, 2007-01-10 |
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| Interesting article: http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/contentPresentation-26.html |
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| -- [[Radomir Dopieralski]], 2007-Mar-15 |
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