(no subject)

Michael Johnson ([email protected])
Mon, 12 Dec 94 07:40:48 EST


>>It might be far too late to change, but would it be possible to redefine
>>(fix) the HTML lists altogether by defining a single structure <L> (list)
>>which may be indexed (i.e. "ordered"), bulleted, dashed, etc. and if indexed,
>>then with a particular type of ordinal (arabic numberal, roman numeral,
>>lowercase alpha, uppercase alpha, etc.).
>
>Good idea.

Not good idea. For one thing, other GML implementations also have UL and OL
and DL, so for consistency from one GML to another, lists should be left this
way.

I also do not think this would make HTML any easier to write or understand,
quite the contrary, I think it would make things less clear. An ordered list
is a distinct abstraction from an unordered list, and the markup used to encode
them should treat them as such. The fact that their visual representations
happen to be similar in a typical browser is NOT a good reason to blur the
structure of an HTML document.

I also think it would be a bad idea to do anything similar to the emphasis
tags. If anything, <B> and <I> and <TT> should be deprecated in favor of the
logical emphasis (phrase) tags such as <EM>, <STRONG> and <SAMP>. One should
not represent semantically different document elements with a common tag!

Michael Johnson
Relay Technology, Inc.