On Sat, Jun 24, 2006 at 10:15:47PM -0600, Chad Perrin wrote:
On Sat, Jun 24, 2006 at 11:57:09PM -0400, Jay R.
Ashworth wrote:
On Sat, Jun 24, 2006 at 05:34:51PM -0600, Chad
Perrin wrote:
There's a difference between semantics
(justified, preformatted, list)
and content (poem, TV script, needed groceries). So, yeah, it's me
asking that.
You're correct, there's a difference.
But, as far as I can see, those first ones are rather specifically not
semantics; they're *syntax*. Looks, not meaning.
Which was sort of my point, as well, I believe, as that of Timwi.
In retrospect, the argument about what constitutes "semantic" tags could
go either way. I was thinking presentational semantics and you were
thinking of semantic presentation, basically. Yes, that's a meaningful
sentence.
It is?
:-)
The distinction I'm accustomed to seeing made is between "semantics",
the meaning of things, and "presentation", the way that meaning is
wrapped in a look, to convey it to the user.
While many meanings may carry the same look, the reason people suggest
that the tagging should reflect the *specific* meaning in each case is
so that back-end processes which might want to can distinguish.
I'm not sure I agree that semantic presentation is
really a great idea
to implement in markup tags. Rather, it seems to be something that
should be managed via properties that are attached to tags. It provides
sort of a natural hierarchical inheritance model, rather than (by way of
analogy) sticking every single file on your hard drive in the root
directory, like the FAT12 filesystem did.
Well, as long as the tags are distinguishable, yeah, but it seems
easier to do <poem> than <special type=poem>, particular in the
Wikipedia milieu.
unix virus: If you're using a unixlike OS, please
forward
this to 20 others and erase your system partition.
Hee. :-)
Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth jra(a)baylink.com
Designer Baylink RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA
http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
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A: Top-posting.
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