> designer > Surely, the fact that <pre> denotes 'preformatting' means that the > formatting has occurred 'somewhere else' and not in the body > of the html. > So, in that sense, in what way is <pre> 'presentational' any > more than all > CSS is 'presentational?
Aeh...I'm not quite following your reasoning here. But to pick up just on the last bit: CSS is *meant* for presentation, while HTML should only mark up *content*. That's where I see the problem: <pre> denotes how something looks, rather than what it is (which is the whole idea of "semantic" markup). > To take a simple example, if I set > CSS rules in > defining <H1> characteristics, is using that <h1> tag in the > html 'purely > presentational' or is it different to <pre>? You'd use <h1> only if the text you're marking up is an actual heading (unless you use <h1> to mark up "oh, i want that text nice and big", in which case you're abusing <h1> for presentational purposes). But to reiterate: <h1> has semantic connotations - the content it marks up is a heading. <pre>, on the other hand, does not provide any indication of what's inside, only how it's displayed. > Sometimes, <pre> strikes me just like a css declaration, > except that you > don't have to declare what the formatting is in the header :-) And that's a bad thing; we want separation of content and presentation. Patrick ________________________________ Patrick H. Lauke Webmaster / University of Salford http://www.salford.ac.uk ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
