On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 8:46 PM, Matthew Paul Thomas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The earliest surviving HTML draft from 1992 includes the <PLAINTEXT> and > <LISTING> elements, both entirely presentational. > <http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/Tags.html> <PLAINTEXT> was aimed to mark the end of hypertext in a document, hence the contents beyond it were to be treated as plain text instead, ignoring anything that could look like markup. That's quite structural, IMO. The fact that the draft described an obvious preferable rendering (intended to make the plain text stand out as plain text) doesn't make it "entirely presentational": if that were the case, almost all elements described there would be presentational. The case of <LISTING> is more of the same: it was intended to denote listings (such as code, terminal output, or directory listings), hence the name, and the draft proposed using monospaced rendering for this element because it generally makes these kinds of listings much easier to read. On both cases, the elements are quite structural, and the rendering described in the draft is simply an obvious consequence of the kind of structure denoted by them.
> HTML+ in 1993 went further: "In many cases it is convenient to indicate > directly how the text is to be rendered, e.g. as italic, bold, underline or > strike-through". <http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/HTMLPlus/htmlplus_16.html> Those > presentational elements continued into HTML 2.0. I wouldn't take too seriously specs that never went beyond the "draft" stage, but if you insist, it'd be interesting to point out that in the introduction of the HTML+ proposal those elements were described as mere "hints". About those elements "continuing" into HTML 2.0, it's worth saying that only three of them (<i>, <b>, and <tt>) were actually included in that version, and for all of them the spec allowed for "alternative representation" (http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_5.html#SEC5.7.2). > HTML has always been a dance between structure and presentation. Too > structural, and humans won't understand it; too presentational, and > computers won't understand it. It hasn't been such a dance: there were a few presentational elements at the beginning, because there was a need to describe the presentation for such cases; then when the presentational needs became more exigent there was an attempt (known as 3.2) to make the language presentational, which soundly failed; and thanks to this failure the W3C realized that HTML couldn't be the solution to these presentational needs, hence they created CSS and added some hooking and embeeding mechanisms in HTML4. All the presentational stuff that is still in HTML after 3.2 is only retained for compatibility with older documents. If there was a dance, it was a quite short one. Actually, it's easier for most humans to understand a document with a clear structure than a non-sense of eye-bleeding presentational tag-soup. Of course, presentation can help humans understanding a document, but it works best when it's used to highlight and emphasize the structure of the document. I'm afraid you are understimating humans. And, besides that, computers actually "understand" completely presentational markup: they understand that something is italic, something is underlined, and some chunk of text is red and right-aligned. Of course, they won't be able to figure out why is something italic, or underlined, or red; but that's not because a limitation of the machines, it's simply because the document doesn't really convey that information. Besides all of this, may I ask you what was the point of your message? I mean, I hope I understood the contents, but I fail to see the intent of it: you just quoted a small comment and tried to prove wrong a point that, even if it is indeed wrong, was not the main point of that comment; mostly because it was taken as the basis for a comparison. Actually, after reviewing in more dept these "pre-histroric" specs, I now see the paralelism between presentation and semantics even more obvious. Greetings, Eduard Pascual
