The Future of HTML!

[Mr Initial Man]

Most importantly, have a look at the code. ^^ (http://mrinitialman.furtopia.org/Stuff_Set_aside/ElementML/elementml.xml)

It's a really short page, I know. And it does NOT work in Internet Explorer, because of the CSS.

[knowj]

nice work.

personally I'm not a big fan of the mark up style looks like its making a lot of work for us developers for the same standards which we archiving now by using html/xhtml correctly.

and lets face it. we will be waiting 50 years before Microsoft realise the style had been invented

[Mr Initial Man]

Nah, all they've gotta do is properly support XML and CSS... wait... yeah, 50 years sounds about right.

[d3sc3n7]

Well, I use IE...so I cant see it...I'm sure its nice though...Stupid IE...cant stay with the learning curve

[KDLA]

Interesting.... :)
how much styling can you do with those types of tags? Anything position-related? Or are they simply text-related?

KDLA

[felgall]

I can't see such code ever taking the place of paragraph, list, heading etc tags. There is no point in having a markup language unless it has the necessary tags to say what the content is. Having only one type of element makes the markup language cumbersome to use.

The standards are moving toward making web page creation easier rather than harder so that is more a 1960s style of markup rather than 2060.

[Mr Initial Man]

KDLA: Probably, all I'd need to do was write the CSS for it.

felgall: My point was that--from my point of view, anyways--XHTML 2.0's simplification of the tag list was making the markup language more cumbersome, forcing us to use the "class" attribute more and more, rather than using the older inline presentational tags which we could then style to our heart's content.

This language is SUPPOSED to be cumbersome; there's this little thing called satire...

[KDLA]

KDLA: Probably, all I'd need to do was write the CSS for it.
Duh. :D
I think it's cool. I was curious as to how you'd position all that without CSS classes and/or ids. like:
<element role="container">a;slkdfjlskj</element>
where "container" knows to pad the area 10px or something without a CSS setting -- perhaps a default setting interpreted by the browser by the doctype you created.

[Mr Initial Man]

Ah. I'd have the css rule read like [role="container"]{padding:10px;} That's why it doesn't work in IE.

[felgall]

felgall: My point was that--from my point of view, anyways--XHTML 2.0's simplification of the tag list was making the markup language more cumbersome, forcing us to use the "class" attribute more and more, rather than using the older inline presentational tags which we could then style to our heart's content.

This language is SUPPOSED to be cumbersome; there's this little thing called satire...


The point that I was trying to make is that the way that the W3C is changing the XHTML standards is the EXACT OPPOSITE of the cumbersome way that you have demonstrated there. Everything that relates to how the page sounds when it is read out or how it looks when it is displayed is moved out of the HTML in order to make the HTML less cumbersome and more device independent. XHTML 2.0 is definitely a lot less cumbersome than any of the (X)HTML versions that have preceeded it BECAUSE it removes all of the presentational tags and attributes that never belonged there in the first place.

[Mr Initial Man]

The point I was trying to make here is that, to be honest, I find stuff like <i>, and <b> to be a lot less cumbersome than <span class="italic"> and <span class="bold">. They're presentational, but I use them when <em> and <strong> are not really good options. Not only that, but I'm watching a lot of other tags (such as <a> and <img>) hit the dumpster as well, and those were HARDLY presentational. So I'm looking at this trend and wondering "Okay, what's next? A reduction of all body tags to <div> and <span>? Or even taking things to the extreme I did?" After all, <span> and <div> do have something to do with the way the page is displayed or sounds. You see what I'm getting at?

[felgall]

How does a web reader speak in bold and italic? Go on say something in bold the way you expect the web reader to say it when reading out your page to a blind person.

<p> <div> <li> <h> etc have nothing to do with how the content looks or sounds, they have to do with what the contents are.

[slaughters]

...Everything that relates to how the page sounds when it is read out or how it looks when it is displayed is moved out of the HTML....That is *exactly* what "Mr Initial Man" demonstrated. Everything relating to how it looks was removed from the HTML. CSS was used for all presentational formatting.

From what I've seen the w3c is going in the EXACT SAME DIRECTION of the cumbersome way that he has demonstrated.

It's not easier to develop code with this standard - it's just easier to re-use code.

I understood the satire of the posted page almost immediately


"How does a web reader speak in bold and italic?" - what silly comment.

If it does not understand a tag a web reader would ignore it, or use approximations using a stronger voice emphasis or modify the timing.

I mean - how does a web reader speak "paragraph" - it is a visual break in a page. How does it speak "<ul>", "<li>" - once again, visual ordering of information on a page.

[Mr Initial Man]

Slaughters has put his finger precisely on what I was trying to say with this page. EVERYTHING on how this page is displayed is dependant on CSS, precisely as the W3C has tried to do. <element>, in and of itself, does nothing. CSS takes the attribute [role], and decides "is this instant going to be bold, italic, superscript, or normal? Will it be even inline or block?" (Still working on how to turn something into a list or page title.)

It seems that the W3C is working on ridding all elements of what they traditionally do, passing the "doing" onto CSS. This is simply the end point of their trend:<element> does nothing, CSS does it all.

[felgall]

A paragraph is presented in different ways depending on whether it is written or spoken. people know what a paragraph is even if they don't see or hear it. A paragraph is what something is and that is what HTML was intended for in the first place - to identify what the parts of the contents are such as paragraphs. The HTML is meant to indicate what the parts of the content are and so elements such as paragraphs will not be replaced in HTML.

It really looks like you don't understand the difference between what (HTML) and how (CSS) well enough if you are proposing that both be removed from HTML when the idea is only to remove how and leave what alone.

A paragraph is still a paragraph even if it isn't spoken or read but is just stored as magnetic impulses on a hard drive.

[Mr Initial Man]

I'm gonna add this to my bookmarks; this is one FASCINATING discussion.

Okay, so <sup>, <b>, and <i> are all "how" in this case?

[felgall]

How do you speak in bold, italics, or superscript - you can't. They only have meaning with written output. That makes them how something is to be written and have no meaning when it comes to how something should be spoken.

<em> and <strong> indicate that something is to be emphesised or strongly emphesised. Some browsers may decide to emphesise them by using bold or italic while a web reader would make appropriate modifications to the voice used to apply the emphesis.

That is basically the difference between <em> and <i> in that the first indicates what to do with the content and leaves it to the program processing the page or the stylesheet to determine how the emphesis is to be applied while the second indicates how the emphesis is to be applied as well and does so in a way that is not appropriate to all situations.

The easiest way of distinguishing the what and how is to consider that the web page is to be spoken rather than displayed or printed and see what tags imply meaningless information in that instance. Those are the tags that are being replaced by CSS. The tags that say what but not how are not going to be removed and I would actually expect that once all the how tags are removed completely that more what tags will then probably be added to the standard.

[slaughters]

How do you speak in bold, italics, or superscript - you can't. .....To SHOUT ...or...to whisper....Hmmm.... I wonder if <em> - that - </em> is what <strong>*I*</strong> meant?

...people know what a paragraph is even if they don't see or hear it....Well <em> - no -</em>.

A paragraph is a visual cue to the reader. It lets them know that a logical break in a dialog or monologue has occurred. An appropriate auditory representation would be a pause of a few seconds, or a change in voices in the case of a dialog between multiple people.

An unordered list (<ul>...<li>..) is a visual cue as well - according to your definition it should not be (or is it just one of those things which is or is not even if you don't see it or hear it?). I assume that an appropriate auditory representation of that would be even a longer pause as each item in the list is read aloud.

P.S. - In case you did not understand the concept of the original page and its motivation. It is an example of what we call <strong>*Humor*</strong>. Lighten up a little dude.

[felgall]

It is normal to make fun of a particular concept by taking what it is doing to the extreme. That apparently is what you think you did with your first post where in fact you took it the other way to the exact opposite extreme to that which the W3C is aiming toward. Now if you had gone the right way THEN it would have been funny.

[Mr Initial Man]

If I'd done things "The Right Way", it wouldn't have made sense to me, because that's not how I viewed what the W3C was doing.

[felgall]

As far as I can see the W3C is trying to split the code between what and how. The HTML defines what the parts of your content are and the stylesheet defines how to render that content for a specific media (which of course may be different for different media since you can't talk in italics and you cant display something in a female voice). Those elements that define how something should be rendered are therefore being removed from HTML while those things that define what the component parts of the content are remain in the HTML and are being reorganised so as to make more sense. The HTML then ends up being independennt of the media and would be equally applicable for any media.

Your example does exactly the reverse of splitting what and how by moving the what into the stylesheet as well as the how and ends up with exactly the same mess in the stylesheet as existed in HTML before the W3C started deprecating the parts that don't belong there.

The purpose of the changes is to make HTML tags semantically meaningful while removing all dependence on what media the content will be rendered in. From what I can see the W3C has moved a fair way along this path without getting sidetracked too much. Unfortunately it will be quite a while before browsers are able to handle where the W3C has already got to.

Your initial example is an excellent one for the sort of mess that the W3C is trying to clean up but in reverse with a whole heap of stuff in the stylesheet that really belongs in the HTML where most web pages are the other way around and therefore is an excellent illustration of where the W3C is trying to move away from with the changes that they are making.

[Mr Initial Man]

I see what your saying. However, if you look at it right, I did do a split between "what" and "how"

"What": Well, it's an element. Very simple.
"How": How the element is displayed (like a paragraph, header, italics, bold, link, etc).

[Ultimater]

I've used XML to simplify layout before; however for styling text, <element role="paragraph">...</element> is just repulsive since it doesn't take avantage of XSL -- which enables the programmer to "define" his/her own tags and render them as he/she pleases. I'd personally write it as <p>...</p> in XML and have XSL render a paragraph element.

[felgall]

I see what your saying. However, if you look at it right, I did do a split between "what" and "how"

"What": Well, it's an element. Very simple.
"How": How the element is displayed (like a paragraph, header, italics, bold, link, etc).


What is it? - its a header, a paragraph, a list, a table, an object, a division

How should it be rendered? - italic, spoken by a male voice, with pink borders

The gramatical equivalents of these two categories would be nouns and verbs with your claiming that everything except "element" is a verb.

[Mr Initial Man]

What is it? - its a header, a paragraph, a list, a table, an object, a division.

Eh, mine's simpler. :D:p

[felgall]

So let's just take your idea to the extreme and replace all the letters in the alphabet with A.

AA AAA'A AAAA AAAA AAAA AAAA AA AAA AAAAAA AAA AAAAAAA AAA AAA AAAAAAA AA AAA AAAAAAAA AAAA A.

That's a much simpler alphabet don't you think ;-)

[Mr Initial Man]

Much. :D

All joking aside, looking at both this conversation and the one over here (http://www.webdeveloper.com/forum/showthread.php?t=140587) is actually really educational. My page is, really, no better than the mess that was HTML 3.2; the mess is just in a different spot. But if you took a look at both ideas, and listed out what was wrong with them and what didn't belong where, you'd get an idea of a happy medium. I know I learned a bit about what HTML is supposed to do/not supposed to do...

Unfortunately, it looks like I have a bunch of <i> tags to replace in a 60-chapter story. *whimper*

[Stephen Philbin]

Duplicate thread locked. See http://www.webdeveloper.com/forum/showthread.php?t=140587 for continuation.