[6307] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: Structured text v. page descriptions (was Netscape, HTML, and Designers)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Nick Arnett)
Tue Oct 25 09:49:44 1994
Date: Tue, 25 Oct 1994 14:47:39 +0100
Errors-To: postmaster@www0.cern.ch
Errors-To: postmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: narnett@verity.com
From: narnett@verity.com (Nick Arnett)
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
At 11:09 AM 10/22/94, Mike Meyer wrote:
>This conflict reflects the underlying conflict in the purpose of HTML.
>While it supposedly describes the structure of a document, it's most
>often used to tell a browser how to present a document. I believe that
>we're going to keep seeing this conflict until some some means of
>unifying the two distinct purposes of HTML is reached.
>
>It was suggested that, in the grand scheme of SGML, HTML is correctly
>viewed aas a presentation language that you translate documents in
>other SGML DTDs into for display purposes. This seems reasonable, so
>long as you keep the goal of being able to lose only presentation
>information as you move from platform to platform in mind.
We shouldn't forget that HTML is also trying to be a user interface
description language, too. That's something that neither structured text
nor page description does well. That's why I've brought up the question
here about HTML becoming part of a larger body of UI description language.
Nick
