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Posted by Joseph Kesselman on 12/08/98 11:42
Martin Underwood wrote:
> HTML isn't meant to be a page layout language - my question is "why isn't
> it?".
Because that isn't what it was designed to be.
The original assumption was that styling/rendering would be handled by
the browser, and you'd pick/configure a browser to suit your own
preferred formatting styles.
Unfortunately, people who didn't understand this concept began abusing
the HTML to try to control rendering. And some of the browser authors
exacerbated that by adding styling features to their pre-standardization
dialects of HTML... and then, when HTML *was* standardized, the
standards committee was unwilling/unable to break those establieshed
(bad) practices.
The right answer is to write pure syntactic markup in HTML -- and then,
if you really care about how it renders, to provide a stylesheet that
implements those preferences. That leaves the reader room to reject the
stylesheet and use their browser's default rendering, or plug in a
different stylesheet. Part of the reason for the move to XHTML is to
allow XSLT (a more powerful stylesheet language than CSS) to render it
into XSL-FO (a more powerful page-layout language than annotated HTML).
> 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.
That kind of style-crafting really isn't what HTML is designed for. You
can't defend an argument that it should have been; don't try. If you
want to publish something in absolutely-locked-in form, render it
yourself into something like PDF before publishing it -- but then don't
complain when your users scream that it doesn't work well on odd-sized
windows or paper.
If you want to redefine "browser" you are copying *exteremly* the wrong
newsgroups. Drop all the HTML discussions from the list. You may or may
not want to drop XML from the list too, unless the new language you're
inventing (and it *is* a new language, not HTML) will be based on XML.
Or consider just authoring XSL-FO directly.
--
Joe Kesselman / Beware the fury of a patient man. -- John Dryden
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