HTML - presentation vs structure

["Peter Dow (ML)" <maillist@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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
>
>
>