Ron Catterall wrote:
> 1. Is Oxygen corrupting the pure XML distinction between structure and
> presentation by introducing 'bold' and 'italic' into XML when what they
> should be doing is offering different ways of emphasizing text. The
> Oxygen solution is no different to what I do when I use <emphasis
> role="bold"> and define how to present 'bold' in my customization
> layer. Unfortunately 'bold' and 'italic' are emotive terms which carry
> presentation meaning - but doesn't <para> also do this as well, we all
> know roughly what a paragraph looks like. Anyway, if you use Oxygen 9
> you don't have to switch to author view if you prefer typing tags.
>
Paragraphs, I think, are more structural. You can still mark up
paragraphs in languages such as traditional Chinese that don't present
them in quite the same way. (I may have to defer to an actual Chinese
speaker for details on that though.) You can also indicate paragraphs in
spoken, non-printed text.
We do have standard means of indicating paragraphs, but even within
English they're not consistent. Sometimes there's extra space between
paragraphs. Sometimes there isn't. Sometimes the first line is indented.
Sometimes it isn't.
So I do think paragraphs are more structural than presentational.
The problem with bold and italic is not that they have semantic meaning.
It's that they have several. Emphasis is not the same thing as a foreign
term or a mathematical equation. Merely marking words as emphasized
does not capture sufficient meaning to enable high quality typesetting.
We can do better.
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold
Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeaulait.org/books/javaio2/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596527500/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA/
