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Re: Semantics and the Web: An Awkward History

• From: Marcus Reichardt <u123724@gmail.com>
• To: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>
• Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2021 00:25:59 +0200

> Am 14.09.2021 um 19:51 schrieb Simon St.Laurent <simonstl@simonstl.com>:
> 
> I tend to see - and attempted to make clear in the presentation - the stagnation of HTML and the abandonment of XML as having far more to do with programmer preferences for imperative models than W3C fixations on markup.  The sequence where the specs ballooned was driven by the W3C's bizarre Semantic Web priorities and members' efforts to shove in as much sugar as as possible for programmers.
> 
> I don't see CSS as especially complex.  Again, not imperative, so not amenable to programmers. Its structure came from well before the W3C thought of XML, and it more or less survived an effort by the XML community to replace it with XSL(T/FO).
> 
> I don't share your opinion that separating structure and presentation is laughable.  I do it daily?

Let me try to explain this latter point: I'm guessing you're into academic publishing right? If so, then HTML can serve you well for casual use with hierarchical text, headings, limited forms of quotes/cites, definition lists for nav, and so on. After all, this was HTML's original purpose at CERN 30 years ago, with almost all tags/elements except anchor elements coming from even older practices originating from the roots of SGML.

But for nearly every other use of text, HTML the markup vocabulary obviously isn't a good fit. Think chat logs, digital image brochures/modern web sites, reveal-type web sites, feeds, medical reports, interviews, presentations such as yours, dialog workflows, or mailing list threads for that matter ;)

Papers get published in proceedings, in journals, as author copies, as preprints, as extended abstracts - for this kind of workflow, the separation of structure and presentation that we've come to accept may work well. Yet the more typical approach for creating artistic text including ads, word marks, tag lines, poetry, propaganda, posters, flyers, and math doesn't consider separation of eg typography and layout from content.

Fitness of a text format for a given task is all about capturing the intent of text close to how it's envisioned by the author, rather than arbitrary separation of structure and presentation. This is one of the basic, explicit tenets of SGML - that you make up your own DOCTYPE for your project at hand, because that structure is the least volatile thing. Yet W3C sat on a fossilized version of HTML4 for such a long time, being busy with trivial meta things and a NIH mindset in anticipation of new general-purpose vocabularies, yet not bringing anything new to SGML, such that everything else had to cater for it - not least the push towards responsive starting with the iPhone launch in 2007.

Best regards

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  • Re: Semantics and the Web: An Awkward History
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>