Re: Initial Draft --Cascaded Speech Style Sheets
Gavin Nicol ([email protected])
Wed, 14 Feb 1996 20:21:02 -0500
>Achieving descriptive markup requires adding a bunch of new,
>descriptive tags - things like PERSONAL-NAME, DATE, VOLUME, ISSUE,
>CHEMICAL-COMPOUND, etc. When you suggest that people hold their fingers
>in the sign of the cross and run off muttering about tag explosion.
...
>I think it's an excellent argument for descriptive markup;
>unfortunately, in the current mindset, the closest thing we're talking
>about to descriptive markup is the CLASS attribute, which is arguably
>less portable, less verifiable, and less easy to teach to authors than
>descriptive tags would be. And I don't really see a unification as
>sensible anyway, except in thte sense of using the same CLASS markup to
>select styling in both stylesheets, so the same document can be
>appropriately displayed in each mode.
This is the crux of the matter. Last year, at the WWW 4 stylesheet
BOF, when I said that tag explosion might be the *best* thing to
happen, a lot of people kind of sniggered (like hey, who's this
idiot), but in actual fact, using CLASS, or any other mechanism just
accomplishes the same thing in a less elegant, and less flexible
manner.
I've almost given up on discussing this though...