Re: Structured text v. page descriptions (was Netscape, HTML, and

Tony Sanders (sanders@bsdi.com)
Tue, 25 Oct 1994 15:59:04 -0500


Chris Lilley, Computer Graphics Unit writes:
> No, I disagree. Look at those documents out there that use illegal HTML,
> browser-specific assumptions, etc to achieve a particular visual effect. How
> many, as a percentage, are static pages without any links? Yup, thought so.
Most of the abuse I've seen is using <Hx> inside of lists and those
documents all have links on them.

And guess who one of the most recent abusers of this is (and who should
know better). With this example of HTML at http://mosaic.mcom.com/:
<H2>
<LI><A HREF="info/newsrelease.html">News Release</A><P>
<LI><A HREF="info/license.html">The License</A><P>
<LI><A HREF="info/how-to-get-it.html">How to Get It!</A><P>
...
</H2>
Which looks totally crappy on my display (and I'll bet it does on others
also, I can't imagine why anyone would want to do this, it is soooo ugly).
They also use <H6> for what should be no more than <B>. Sigh. Anyway,
I've pointed this out to them and (and even got mail back) but it never
got fixed.

> Lastly of course there is the issue of what happens when the majority of the Web
> shifts from using an Open document format to a proprietary one....

I don't see it happening myself unless they give away PDF-Web
(maybe they are).