[6067] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re:
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Brian Behlendorf)
Thu Oct 6 18:40:33 1994
Date: Thu, 6 Oct 1994 23:37:17 +0100
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: brian@wired.com
From: Brian Behlendorf <brian@wired.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
On Thu, 6 Oct 1994, Brian Gaines wrote:
> > It should be noted that people who use desktop publishing software heavily
> > (Quark, Word, etc.) have it drilled into them to *never* put line breaks at
> > the end of the sentences, only at the ends of paragraphs. Now, conceptually
> > asking them to end their lines with a hard break and beginning and ending
> > paragraphs in <P></P> might not sound too hard to us, but to them it's
> > like asking them to use a Dvorak keyboard. This actually came up in the
> > realization by people here that typing long strings into TEXTAREA fields
> > without line breaks is aesthetically pretty ugly and contrary to what
> > most people are used to.
> >
>
> The logic seems back to front. Putting a <P> at the beginning of a paragraph
> (the </P> is optional and rarely used) marks a para without line breaks
> eaxctly as in a word processor. The original use of <P> at the end to break a
> para was probably more natural but bad sgml.
Really? I thought the concensus was to encapsulate paragraphs in <P>,
and that it *was* good SGML (and allowed things like <P ALIGN=CENTER>,
which we really REALLY want).
> TEXTAREA fields should always word wrap exactly as a word processor, and
> are aesthetically, and in human factors, exactly what a word processor
> user would expect.
What browser does this for you? None of the ones I've tested do, I don't
think....
> The nice thing about html and forms is that they DO conform to what most
> word processor users expect.
I wish.
> The semi-binary interpretation of <pre> is fine now that it is well-defined.
> It will continue to confuse new users of html who naturally assume that
> 'preformatted' actually means simply 'preformatted', but will always be
> essential to read the specifications carefully to use html correctly. It
> is a precise programming language not a set of intuitively grounded
> suggestions.
Which is a good way to intimidate content providers away from HTML.
Again, maybe I'm making a bigger deal out of this than I need to,
expecially when doing a s/CR/CRLF/g is so easy to fix this problem.
Brian
