

RE: A query please

From: Dave J Woolley <david.woolley@bts.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 11:40:24 +0100
Message-ID: <81E4A2BC03CED111845100104B62AFB5824B14@stagecoach.bts.co.uk>
To: www-html@w3.org
> From:	Daniel Acton [SMTP:dacton@itouch.co.za]
> the browsers aren't doing their jobs well enough. I'd like to see two
> browsers made by two different manufacturers producing the same output
> from the _same_ code... A pipe dream? I wonder ...?
It's also a serious violation of the original spirit of
HTML, which is about the deeper structure of the information.
HTML is intended to convey the same information when presented
through many different technologies, including non-visual ones,
and to allow the user to optimise presentation to their needs.
The HTML 1 specification actually states that colour has no
place in HTML.

HTML is not really suitable for what commercial designers use
it for.  What they are really authoring for is a pre-installed
thin client.  The design philosophy of PDF has always much better
matched commercial requirements, but it can't be relied updon to
be pre-installed, and Adobe missed the boat in terms of winning
hearts and minds amongst designers.  The HTML concept was created
when PDF already exxisted and was deliberately not to be another

SVG will be a better fit for commercial designers, assuming that
Microsoft provide a good implementation as part of Internet Explorer,
unfortunately it will remove a constraint on those designers which 
currently means about 50% of web pages are useable in simple text
only tools, screen readers, etc.

At the moment, if you want consitent presentation of page layout
and other presesntation aspects across platforms, use PDF.  In
future, consider SVG.  If you are interested in conveying unbiased
information to as many people as possible, use clean HTML.

Received on Friday, 20 October 2000 06:41:00 GMT
