[lug] html default res.

[Tkil]

>>>>> "jd" == j davis <j> writes:

jd> So....can you point me to a good how to or give me a few words of
jd> wisdom on how to write decent muli-platform html?

It depends on what you're trying to do.  Are you trying to put out
information so that the most people can use it?  Or are you trying to
design an on-line glossy ad brochure?  I don't much care for the
latter, so I'll let others address it.

"Multi-platform" HTML is a bit of a misnomer.  Basic HTML is
intrinsically multi-platform -- not just mac vs. pc vs. linux, but
it is also accessible to speech synthesizers, search engines,
text-mode browsers, cell phones, PDAs, etc.

How do you accomplish all this?  Simple: remove everything that
controls appearance ("physical markup") and keep everything that
describes the content ("semantic markup").  This is even more true in
XML.  Even just in HTML, which of these provides more information?

   There is <em>much</em> more information in <cite>Jane's Book of
   Weapons</cite> than I've included here.

Or

   There is <i>much</i> more information in <i>Jane's Book of
   Weapons</i> than I've included here.

The latter just says to italicize the text (which is already a
problem: how does one italicize speech?  Or on a text-mode terminal?);
the former tells us *why* those spans should be italicized.

Continue this for everything, and you get much closer to
"multi-platform HTML".  Of course, it won't look as flashy as one
might like, but that's a preference thing.

There are a few places where physical details matter: in the stuff I
work with, I do use tables for table things, and I often would like
some way of putting text into columns (or at least putting an upper
bound on how wide a column can be, to avoid having 300+ characters on
a single line).  Even these issues can be resolved by using a separate
stylesheet, instead of embedding physical markup in the content.

Everything else -- background color, fonts, etc -- I leave to the
user.  Doing this will give you multi-platform, multi-device, multi-
format content (think: LaTeX2HTML), that won't break because someone
has big fonts to help their vision, small fonts to conserve screen
real estate, text mode on a thin client device, speech synthesizers
if they're blind...

There is a lot that's already been written about this:

   http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/#guidelines
   http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/

To me, the most important thing is to be clear about what you're
trying to do.  If you are trying to share information, don't you want
that to go to as many people as possible?  As such, shouldn't you make
as few demands on those clients as you could?

t.