× The internal search function is temporarily non-functional. The current search engine is no longer viable and we are researching alternatives.
As a stop gap measure, we are using Google's custom search engine service.
If you know of an easy to use, open source, search engine ... please contact support@midrange.com.


  1.  Home
  2. WEB400
  3. February 2007

HTML - presentation vs structure

Hi Joe,
My wife is taking a course on XHTML and in the text book, they tell the history of HTML and CSS. According to that book, HTML was supposed to be about structure, not presentation. Then people started using it and wanting to change the presentation stuff, so browser writers started adding tags for that all over the place. It started getting out of hand and that's when w3c was started, in order to get things back on track, where HTML is presentation, and this new-fangled CSS would handle the presentation part. I think that was around HTML 3.02 and 4.01.
I can see a lot of room for argument about what's structure and what's presentation, but when you said "HTML is presentation level..." I thought I'd jump in and give everyone something to start wrangling about tomorrow (tomorrow is Friday, isn't it?). 

*Peter Dow* /
Dow Software Services, Inc.
909 793-9050
pdow@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:pdow@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> /

Joe Pluta wrote:

From: Alfredo Delgado

When you use tables for content layout you end up breaking up
information by what it'll look like on the screen instead of how it
logically goes together.


But how else should it logically go together other than how it looks on the
screen?  HTML is presentation level, not transmission level.  If you want to
send the data to the client completely presentation-agnostic, the best thing
would be to send it as pure XML and then use XSLT to transform it on the
fly.



XHTML still has table tags because they're what
should be used for tabulated data. You can apply styles to these tags
just like any other.


But if you think about it, a typical business application is all about
tabular data.  A customer information screen is a table of field names and
values.  An order history screen is a table showing columns of data from
orders.

With a few exceptions, business data is tabular in nature.

Joe

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

This thread ...
Follow-Ups:
Replies:
Follow On AppleNews
Return to Archive home page | Return to MIDRANGE.COM home page

This mailing list archive is Copyright 1997-2024 by midrange.com and David Gibbs as a compilation work. Use of the archive is restricted to research of a business or technical nature. Any other uses are prohibited. Full details are available on our policy page. If you have questions about this, please contact [javascript protected email address].

Operating expenses for this site are earned using the Amazon Associate program and Google Adsense.