Re: [docbook] strict versus transitional XHTML tables [was: DocBook Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 18 Mar 2003]

[BigSmoke <bigsmoke@home.nl>]

On Wednesday 19 March 2003 00:22, Paul Grosso wrote:
> We're comparing having an author write:
>
>   <td role="glump">
>
> versus
>
>   <td bgcolor="green">
>
> I'm amazed people are arguing that it makes more sense for
> the author to do the former.

The greatest struggle of previous years have been to encourage people to 
abondon horrible contructs like bgcolor within the semantic mark-up.

The point of semantic mark-up is that it contains just semantics. If the
W3C sees attributes like bgcolor as a bad accident, so could we. Even
in XHTML it's disastrous. I usually write stylesheets for different
media-types and it hardly ever occurs that I want to use the same colors
in different media-types.
  With DocBoook this becomes a much stronger argument, since the very
essence of DocBook to me is that I can convert it to as many output formats
as I want, with the colors that I want because the system understands the
semantics.

How should my stylesheet know what to do with a bgcolor='green',
when I'm converting to a black and white PDF? It shouldn't, since my
stylesheets are the entities which I use for defining lay-out, not for
interpretting it.

 - Rowan

-- 
Don't fear fear.