This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Date: Mon, 25 Dec 2000 21:58:54 -0800 To: Silicon Valley Users Group <svlug@svlug.org> Subject: Re: [svlug] Documentation markup preferences and reasons From: Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> begin kmself@ix.netcom.com quotation: >> I'm wary of tools influenced by people who can't distinguish between >> document markup and page layout. > > Could you expand on that? I'm not sure I understand the significance. Consider the theory of operation behind Web browsers: Someone has HTML-marked some text and graphics, which will be delivered to browsers via HTTP transfers. With some exceptions, the HTML tagging is intended to serve a semantic purpose. That is, tag pairs describe what parts of the document do, and what kind of contents are contained within them. Armed with this semantic description of the document, the browser then interprets the document however is best done for whatever output device it services, if any. (It might just a daemon process building indexes, or such.) Thus, as a minor example, the person doing markup might designate some text as "emphasised" (EM) or "strong" (STRONG), if that was the semantic nature of the text in question. He would not attempt to dictate appearance details of the document's future presentation by browsers, having little idea about the output environment and local settings, and therefore knowing that such an attempt would be foolish and counter-productive. That was the idea. But, now, add hordes of unemployed desktop-publishing monkeys, seeking to find new careers as "Web designers". They ignore utterly the fundamental theory behind HTML markup, and do everything they can to finely specify sizes, placement, colours, typefaces, type sizes -- ignoring the fact that this is quite impossible on a heterogeneous Web, and that, the more furiously they attempt to assert control over appearance, the worse their results will be. They don't use EM and STRONG. Why? Because, dammit, they want italics _here_, and bold _here_. Users with setups they don't approve of will just have to suffer. So, it's always I and BOLD tags, instead. You send them to read the "This Page Optimized for... Arguing with Customers" essay (http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/opti.html), and they just throw a tantrum and refuse to deal with the issue. So, there is much about the DocBook informational sites that suggests that the brain-dead WYSIWYG mindset described runs rampant, there. I'd have to go back and re-read them to cite specific examples, but I got a dull ache in the back of my head just browsing them. And TeX definitely has none of that conceptual blindness about it. None at all. === Date: Tue, 26 Dec 2000 08:08:02 -0800 To: Silicon Valley Users Group <svlug@svlug.org> Subject: Re: [svlug] Documentation markup preferences and reasons From: Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> begin kmself@ix.netcom.com quotation: > Sorry, Rick, but I'm getting a SIG_NONSEQ error here. What about > DocBook is layout-oriented? Or is it the OASIS website itself you're > bitching about? Sorry, I thought I was very specific about that: I was saying it was an impression I was getting strongly from the DocBook-information Web sites. I was a bit put off, and for that and other (better) reasons, deferred learning DocBook, itself. ===