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Re: What format? (Was: General List Information)

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From: Stephan Schulz (schulz@informatik.tu-muenchen.de)
Date: Thu Aug 10 2000 - 07:47:42 CDT


On Thu, Aug 10, 2000 at 04:40:15AM +0200, Tom Parsons wrote:

> John Verne wrote,
> >
> > HTML was designed to be a "text-markup" language, not a "page design"
> > language. The purpose of the tags is not just to make the page look
> > good, but to help express the meaning of the document.
>
> Very important observation. But the problem is that HTML not only does
> not implement page design but also rides rough-shod over any attempt by
> the author to make the page look good--as (for example) anyone who has
> ever wanted to indent paragraphs can tell you. You can do it, but I've
> never seen a way that wasn't a hack. And this is just one of the more
> conspicuous examples.

Not at all. HTML (well, ideally) makes no promise about how the page
looks - thats is left to the browser's rendering engine. There is
nothing in HTML (that I know of) that forbids a rendering engine to
interprete a <p> tag as "break, small space, indent next
line". Unfortunatly, in most browsers <p> is more or less equivalent
to <br><br>.

For basic markup, HTML tags are quite similar to LaTeX, and nobody
ever claimed problems with making normal text look good in LaTeX.

Stephan

-- 
-------------------------- It can be done! ---------------------------------
   Please email me as schulz@informatik.tu-muenchen.de (Stephan Schulz)
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