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Posted by Martin Underwood on 10/20/90 11:42
Harlan Messinger wrote in message
47qra1Fgli9cU1@individual.net:
> Martin Underwood wrote:
>> Next wrote in
>> 1142354536.224320.60080@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com:
>>
>> I think the bigger issue with HTML and browser design is that it only
>> supplies *hints* and *suggestions* as to the formatting, rather than
>> making all browsers display a page with identical formatting, as PDF
>> does. It would be so much easier as the designer of a site if you
>> could be confident that everyone would see the same view of the page
>> without the line breaks and table column widths being variable under
>> user control.
>
> HTML is simply not meant to be a page layout language. It's a document
> markup language, and presentation is meant to be secondary. There's
> normally no reason why a document needs to be displayed in a single
> fixed format, and if you try, you make life difficult or impossible
> for a large percentage of your audience.
Therein lies the problem: expecting web sites to be read on a very wide
variety of browers and devices, rather than saying that for a browser to be
a browser it has to conform to a very tightly-controlled standard. I know
HTML isn't meant to be a page layout language - my question is "why isn't
it?".
If I send a Word document, I don't expect people to be able, at a stroke, to
alter the sizes of all my fonts - apart from zooming in and out of the whole
page - thus destroying my carefully-crafted page layout. I wish browsers had
been designed with page layout given as much thought as content.
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