Re: [OT] Abuse of div and span (was: Cocoon written in PHP)

[Hugh Field-Richards]

We must agree to differ - a pet peeve of mine is that people use HTML as a data structure language rather than as a page mark up language (cf TeX) :-) . HTML has absolutely nothing to do with data structuring - it (with CSS) only determines what goes where on a page. We are trying to use a language which is neither XML (structural) or PostScript (true page mark up) which is why it needs XML and CSS.  The problem is that while HTML undoubtedly has some structural information such as paras, headings, lists etc., these are about the only ones it has. It also mixes in pure style constructs such as italic (which tell you nothing about the structure and why they are italic). To be really useful we need to have extra structural tags in the HTML such as author, date, version, footnote, inline note, citation ... - the list is obviously not insubstantial depending on the structure you are representing. Since HTML is not extendable (that was why XML was done) we have a problem. Not until XML + sensible style sheets are used instead of HTML will there be a solution that satisfies both of us. This is why Cocoon is so important - it is all a question of information flow (or some might say, entropy). I can take too much information (in XML) and deliver it in a variety of formats (HTML, PDF etc) by losing information that I do not want. But I cannot go the other way around. For example start with HTML or PDF and produce XML that is the structure that the author intended. Although by clever use of classes etc. you might end up with sufficient XML granularity to achieve this, butI believe that this is against the spirit of the whole thing. So, the question is, does it matter about divs and spans? I believe not because I would not dream of taking HTML and try and do something useful with it (screen scrapping for example) other than displaying it on a browser. If required to interpret the data it is best to deliver it in a form that is amenable to this: raw or processed XML. btw I did look at Firefox output with no style and it looked fine. I agree you could not see the headings (they looked like paras) but it certainly was not unreadable. I would totally agree with you if I had used positional information for the flow, rather than simple vertical stacking. Previous sites that I used Cocoon for always had a facility to output the data for a variety of browsers including Lynx which is styleless. Ultimately it is all a question of how you view HTML. There probably is no "correct" answer to this (cf the big-endian, little-endian holy wars of processor and bus design in the 1980s). Let us hope that XML comes sooner rather than later to the Web. My opinion is that since we are using HTML as page markup it does not really matter using divs and spans, because we get very little other benefit from using <p> and <h1> etc. However it is not something I would stake my life on. It is all a m,atter of personal preference I guess. Thanks for the appreciation of the software though. - Hugh On 7 Aug 2006, at 16:45, Jason Johnston wrote: <t:p>Paloose is a simplified (much simplified) version of ... </t:p> There is nothing here that indicates the final look (obviously). The relevant template <xsl:template match="t:p" mode="inline-text">        <xsl:element name="div">           <xsl:attribute name="class">normalPara</xsl:attribute>           <xsl:apply-templates mode="inline-text"/>        </xsl:element> </xsl:template>   translates this into a simple HTML div <div class="normalPara">Paloose is a simplified (much simplified) version of ... </div> Argh! This is a particular pet peeve of mine.  HTML provides the <p> element specifically for marking up paragraphs.  By using a <div> you've removed any semantic meaning from the markup!  It might as well not be HTML at all.  You can apply the same CSS styles to any HTML element, so why not use something that carries a well-known semantic meaning that can be interpreted equally well by non-visual means, and that has a useful default styling for when your CSS isn't applied?  Same goes for headings: <h1>, <h2>, etc. are much more appropriate than divs with special classes. I always find it a good exercise when building a site to view it without any CSS applied (in Firefox: View->Page Style->No Style), and if I can still clearly see the structure of the page's content (heading hierarchy, paragraphs, lists, etc.) then it's good.  If on the other hand all the paragraphs and headings run together without any visual clues to their meaning (as happens with the Paloose site!) then I've probably got some work to do. Sorry to get off-topic, just hate to see <div> and <span> over-used in place of perfectly good semantic HTML. Nice software though!  I look forward to giving it a try. :-) --Jason --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ================================= Dr H.S. Field-Richards MIEE MIEEE CEng BSc PhD [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.hopvine-music.com