Post #63,214
11/16/02 10:57:42 AM
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sorry I agree with bryce here
a break is a break is a break defined by type.
thanx,
bill
will work for cash and other incentives [link|http://home.tampabay.rr.com/boxley/resume/Resume.html|skill set]
"Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic." Correction: All that can be achieved with 51 percent of the voters!" Ilanna Mercer
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Post #63,216
11/16/02 11:05:31 AM
11/16/02 11:23:16 AM
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Then use breaks
A paragraph is an entity that hapens to include breaks above and below.
In any decent page layout scheme (and HTML fails the "decent" qualification by miles), a paragraph includes an attribute sheet, such as how much whitespace above and below, indent / undent, font and size, bulleting or enumeration, and what following paragraph style it will spawn.
A paragraph may include breaks, which start a new line and may even insert white space, but which do not start a new paragraph, thus it is seen to transcent breaks, being a higher level "container object".
We see then, that a paragraph is, in wider practice, an entity with bounds, and in html these bounds are properly defined by the p and /p tags. The fact that anyone can even view paragraphs as a text stream divided by double breaks is simply one of the many weaknesses of HTML.
[link|http://www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
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Post #63,218
11/16/02 11:12:28 AM
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There's nothing to agree with.
A <p> tag *is* a container, whether you like it or not.
Peter
[link|http://www.debian.org|Shill For Hire]
[link|http://www.kuro5hin.org|There is no K5 Cabal]
[link|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org|Blog]
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Post #63,365
11/17/02 5:01:50 AM
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That's not what I was saying.
My personal opinion about the "correctness" of the P tag being a container was never mentioned. I was commenting that Bryce himself has revealed why he can't understand why the P tag is a container.
Wade.
"Ah. One of the difficult questions."
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Post #63,422
11/17/02 2:33:12 PM
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Officially Optional
My personal opinion about the "correctness" of the P tag being a container was never mentioned.
Then why was a P closing tag made *officially optional* in the first place? Did they have my virus, and then were later cured?
Answer: because it is a pain in the ass and distracting eye-clutter to keep typing closing tags for it even though most of the time one is not altering paragraph attributes for each new paragraph.
Maybe they are flip-flopping now. It just means that the original standards group was more practical minded than the latest crop of stuffy european bloatocracy specialists.
________________
oop.ismad.com
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Post #63,433
11/17/02 3:58:53 PM
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Probably because . .
. . the original committee included a bunch of typing challenged C programmers who hadn't a clue where HTML would be going in the real world or why it would ever be used for anything beyond a few academic documents.
A committee that produces a page layout language that has no way to control white space is totally brain dead from the start, and there's a hell of a lot of repair work still needed. Removing the "optional" from closing a container tag is just one simple item.
[link|http://www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
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Post #63,434
11/17/02 4:06:23 PM
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Re: Probably because . .
HTML was never designed as a page layout language.
That's PostScript you're thinking of.
Peter
[link|http://www.debian.org|Shill For Hire]
[link|http://www.kuro5hin.org|There is no K5 Cabal]
[link|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org|Blog]
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Post #63,435
11/17/02 4:40:07 PM
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That's the standard cop out . .
. . "It's a markup language, not a page layout language".
Markup languages have been used for page layout ever since the first electronic typesetting machine, and quite capable they have been. I used markup languages to format my business documents for more than a decade (Mince/Scribble > Perfect Writer > Final Word > Sprint) and they do a fine job.
HTML arranges text and graphics on a page for viewing, thus it is a page layout language. It differs from others in allowing far more interpretation at the viewer's end.
The primary failure of the HTML design team was insufficient vision as to what Web pages would be used for, and why much greater control of the page would be needed for many uses.
The only really useful layout tool they provided was the ability to abuse tables. They might have tried to prevent that if they had any idea what desperate page designers would be using tables for.
Less capable designers have resorted to the abomination of fixed size fonts and images of text. What Microsoft Word does in a vain attempt to control an HTML page is better left unseen and undiscussed.
[link|http://www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
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Post #63,440
11/17/02 5:26:16 PM
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Your browser is Ronald Reagan
The phrase comes from Neal Stephenson's [link|http://artlung.com/smorgasborg/C_R_Y_P_T_O_N_O_M_I_C_O_N.shtml|In the Beginning Was the Command Line]. Highly recommended reading. I'll also note that Stephenson runs Debian, for nontrivial reasons. \r\n\r\n \r\nWhen Ronald Reagan was a radio announcer, he used to call baseball games by reading the terse descriptions that trickled in over the telegraph wire and were printed out on a paper tape. He would sit there, all by himself in a padded room with a microphone, and the paper tape would eke out of the machine and crawl over the palm of his hand printed with cryptic abbreviations. If the count went to three and two, Reagan would describe the scene as he saw it in his mind's eye: "The brawny left-hander steps out of the batter's box to wipe the sweat from his brow. The umpire steps forward to sweep the dirt from home plate." and so on. When the cryptogram on the paper tape announced a base hit, he would whack the edge of the table with a pencil, creating a little sound effect, and describe the arc of the ball as if he could actually see it. His listeners, many of whom presumably thought that Reagan was actually at the ballpark watching the game, would reconstruct the scene in their minds according to his descriptions. \r\n \r\n\r\n So it is with the browser. HTML is structural hints. Browser provides client interpretation. And that interpretation is malleable through various means, be they client restrictions (text-mode browsers, text-to-speech browsers, programmer discretion, stylesheets). \r\n\r\n There are presentation-oriented markup languages. PostScript is just this, and Postscript and PDF format documents are the de facto standards for distributing materials in a consistent-presentation format. Note that this has its problems. Jakob Nielson identifies this as [link|http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20021111.html|a major detractor from intranet useability]: \r\n\r\n \r\nPDF Morass \r\n\r\nSpecial mention must be reserved for a single, simple design mistake that caused huge usability problems for the users in our study: unconverted PDF files. These files were especially troublesome when they were used to post an entire employee handbook or other massive document on the intranet in a single unnavigable and overwhelming mass. \r\n\r\nPDF is great for printing. And it's fine to have printable documents available on the intranet, which saves distribution costs and gives employees instant access to print out whatever they need. But don't take the lazy way out and just stick a PDF handbook on the intranet; give users other options for accessing the information as well. Search, navigation, and online reading are all enhanced when you convert content into well-designed intranet pages, each containing a meaningful chunk of information about a specific topic with cross-reference links to related material. \r\n \r\n\r\n Nielsen's also covered the issue of [link|http://useit.mondosearch.com/cgi-bin/MsmGo.exe?grab_id=8080800&EXTRA_ARG=&host_id=2&page_id=89&query=pdf&hiword=PDF+|PDF] and [link|http://useit.mondosearch.com/cgi-bin/MsmGo.exe?grab_id=8080800&EXTRA_ARG=&host_id=2&page_id=142&query=pdf&hiword=PDF+|print as a medium]. \r\n\r\n CSS allows the user to control presentation. I've demonstrated this myself with the [link|http://twiki.iwethey.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/UserContentCSS|UserContentCSS] TWIT node. I use both a default stylesheet which overrides a number of HTML directives, from font size and face (standardized to my preferences) to advertising boxes and embedded objects (both simply not displayed). I'm starting to provide other "problem fix" stylesheets which can be selectively applied to sites with specific faults (background colors, poor frame sizing, etc.). The user and user agent determine presentation. Don't ever forget this. This isn't print-on-the-web, it's a new medium. It's not entirely divorced from what's come before (as some would like you to believe). It is fundamentally different in that the medium is malleable. \r\n\r\n Yes, designers can attempt to dictate presentation and content. The best way to do same is in a way that gracefully acknowledges a user's preferences, rather than rigidely insisting that there is some One True Way to present information. Yes, there are sites whose design strikes me as beautiful, graceful, useful. But there are far more which are rendered by fasciast design-school rejects (or worse: design-school graduates). And a huge majority for which design really doesn't particularly matter, so setting my own preferences is preferable. --\r\nKarsten M. Self [link|mailto:kmself@ix.netcom.com|kmself@ix.netcom.com]\r\n[link|http://kmself.home.netcom.com/|http://kmself.home.netcom.com/]\r\n
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?\r\n
[link|http://twiki.iwethey.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/|TWikIWETHEY] -- an experiment in collective intelligence. Stupidity. Whatever.\r\n
\r\n
Keep software free. Oppose the CBDTPA. Kill S.2048 dead.\r\n[link|http://www.eff.org/alerts/20020322_eff_cbdtpa_alert.html|http://www.eff.org/alerts/20020322_eff_cbdtpa_alert.html]\r\n
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Post #63,450
11/17/02 6:08:57 PM
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I understand the principle and do not argue with it . .
. . but I consider the tools provided at the creation end to be insufficient to the job of providing adequate hints to the interpreter. The types of pages provided for are simply inadequate except for academic papers and other very simple documents.
Once again, a layout language without even the most rudimentary ability to describe white space is brain dead from birth - and you have your Reagan browser making up a lot of stuff because it's working with an inadequate information set.
Trying to compensate for the lack of basic layout features is, in my opinion, the root cause of a great deal of the mess you are trying to correct from the user end. If the creation tools were adequate, you'd be doing a lot less repair.
PDF, while capable of a minor supporting role, is of limited use because it is far too rigid. So we are stuck with a huge unserved territory between inadequacy and inflexibility.
[link|http://www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
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Post #63,521
11/18/02 1:56:47 AM
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Re: Your browser is Ronald Reagan
If we had reasonable Postscript-based displays, we could draw on them directly without an intermediary. Don't blame PDF. It's one of the good things.
-drl
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Post #63,474
11/17/02 7:34:03 PM
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I thought we'd reached an and to this discussion?
But to recap: I don't know why HTML < 4 had the </p> tag optional, but I can theorise that because the DTD langauge used (SGML) supports optional closing tags, they thought it would be a good idea*. I do know that the designers of XML realized that optional closing tags are A Difficult Problem for parsers, to they ditched the idea. Since the latest HTML standards are derived from XML, optional closing tags are therefore no longer optional. This affects more than just <p>**, BTW. Tags like <lt> are also affected. Wade, merrily playing "here-we-go-round the cul-de-sac" with Bryce... * with 20/20 hindsight and this discussion in view, I am thinking it wasn't a good idea. ** and in XML, a <P> tag is different from a <p> tag, too. "Ah. One of the difficult questions."
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Post #63,513
11/18/02 12:52:24 AM
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Feed the people, not the parser
I do know that the designers of XML realized that optional closing tags are A Difficult Problem for parsers, to they ditched the idea.
F*ck the parser, make life easier on the people.
________________
oop.ismad.com
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Post #63,572
11/18/02 11:04:01 AM
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The SEP field is reaching astronomical proportions.
Many fears are born of stupidity and ignorance -
Which you should be feeding with rumour and generalisation.
BOfH, 2002 "Episode" 10
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Post #63,698
11/18/02 10:26:49 PM
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Did you want the 5 minute or the 10 minute argument? :-)
"Ah. One of the difficult questions."
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