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