[WikiEN-l] simplicity of markup and presentation

[Gutza]

tarquin wrote:

> A while ago some bright spark thought to put a DIV around the 
> statement of maths theorems, with a dashed purple border.
> Today it's boxes with coloured borders for disambiguation notes.
>
> Here's why these are bad ideas:
> [snip list]

I've started replying to this three times and closed the "Compose" 
window just as many times. Why? Because I actually have nothing to add, 
my message could just as well be void, because I have very little more 
to add. Why I sent it after all? Because I feel exactly the same way, in 
a strong way, and wanted to get my "vote" counted in. :)

Apart from your considerations though, I wanted to clarify the reason 
why we're asking for this: I hate clogging content and formatting into 
one ugly mess. I know that also what you're basically advocating 
against, just wanted to clarify the general concept and the benefits, 
apart from ease of editing.

The source should only contain information (plain text) and 
meta-information ("this is text regarding disambiguation", "this is text 
regarding maths", "this is a caption for an image") in some technical 
way or another, but not formatting per se ("there is a purple box around 
this text", "this is large text", "this is green underlined text on pink 
background"--imagine that!). In that regard, XML, proper HTML or at 
least custom CSS styles could be used for tables as well. Tables are a 
cross-breed between meta-information and presentation, it's hard to 
separate the two in this case. What you can do though is properly mark 
the table header as header and the body as table body, as opposed to 
marking the first row render in bold on a gray background, and rendering 
the rest of the table in default style. The former solution is elegant, 
uniform, allows custom formatting based on purpose (web, personal 
printing, PDF output, high volume printing, 3rd party importing) whereas 
the latter is ugly, messy, non-uniform and set in stone formatting-wise.

2c+2c=5c :)

[[User:Gutza]]