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> We worked hard to get our authors and editors to quit
> thinking about specific presentation and focus on content and structure
> (it's a fragile thing still); please, please don't tell them it's just a
myth!
It will always be a fragile thing because human readers extract so much
information by "reading between the lines", and specifically from the
presentation. If a paragraph is in a smaller font than the surrounding
paragraphs that says something to me*. But the goal of persuading authors to
make that "something" explicit - to say WHY they want to use a smaller font,
so that the designer can choose an alternative way of conveying the subtle
meaning - is a perfectly valid one, and this goal indeed lies behind a lot
of the adoption of XML.
I'm afraid I didn't understand Xasima's argument to the contrary.
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
* I remember in the early days of word processors someone saying to me that
if I wanted people to read a document as an early draft and treat it
accordingly, I should use a typewriter font and double line spacing...
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