Rich Shepard wrote:
On Mon, 31 Mar 2008, Michael Wojcik wrote:
It's an attribute, not a tag. And it's deprecated in HTML 4.0, and
omitted
entirely in XHTML 1.0. The correct way to specify justification in
contemporary HTML is with a style.
That's because xhtml has moved toward separation of content and
formatting, just as LaTeX/LyX does. The xhtml has the content and the css
has the formatting.
Yes, HTML is finally catching up with proper document markup languages
like CTSS RUNOFF (invented in 1964) in that regard. Of course, RUNOFF
led to Multics runoff, which led to Unix roff. As an undergrad I wrote
papers in roff (with I think the "misc" macro package) and printed
them with troff on an IBM mainframe laser printer. This was the late
1980s, and the results were pretty slick.
RUNOFF also seems to have led to IBM SCRIPT. Partly in response to
difficulties with the RUNOFF family, Goldfarb, Mosher, and Lorie
invented GML (also IBM, in 1969), which became SGML, which spawned
HTML, then XML, then XHTML...
Those who forget the separation of presentation and content are doomed
to reinvent it. But only after inculcating bad habits in most of their
users.
(Note the Wikipedia pages for SCRIPT and GML are a bit confused, as
usual, about the history and chronology. Goldfarb's own "Personal
Recollection"[1] is a better source of information.)
Meanwhile, Knuth created TeX beginning in the late 1970s (the first
TeXbook edition was 1982, I think), independently of the RUNOFF / GML
families - though I'm sure he was aware of them. TeX of course
incorporated significant features that other markup languages did not,
such as the sophisticated layout algorithms and extensive support for
typesetting mathematical notation. But it too separated content and
presentation.
For that matter, HTML originally tried to separate content and
presentation to some extent. That's why it had "strong" and
"em[phasis]" tags, for example - presentation was the task of the user
agent. But authors wanted more control over presentation (often for no
good reason), and HTML became a mess of mixed markup. Modern XHTML
plus external stylesheets is really the only way to restore a measure
of sanity to HTML.
[1] http://www.sgmlsource.com/history/roots.htm
--
Michael Wojcik
