Hello,
But after all the time the web design community has
spent trying to get
us to deal in semantics, rather than presentation, it seems pretty ironic
to me that we see such a pressure to do precisely the opposite...
Just a minor
note: I think semantics vs presentation is a false
dichotomy. That drill was about structure vs presentation.
For those of us who are interested in semantics, the visual editor and
its DOM+microdata scheme is really good news!
I refer here to the fact that formatting info is mixed with
semantic(-like) markup in wikitext. In html for example you could use
GRDDL (I haven't ever seen it in application), RDFa, microformats and
now microdata. They all can give you a layer for semantic annotations
that is separable from the structural information. A heaven for robots
collecting semantic info.
So semantics is exactly why the current parser/editor plans are so
exciting. I know tat they are doing it because of a tendency that the
old interface is failing to attract some otherwise capable new
editors. But I think there will be a huge collateral profit for the
projects dealing with semantics.
Best
Mihály