If there's no CSS, then the browser uses its defaults.
The W3C's own website says (ref. http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/ ('What is
HTML')):
"HTML is the lingua franca for publishing hypertext on the World Wide
Web. ... HTML uses tags such as <h1> and </h1> to structure text into
headings, paragraphs, lists, hypertext links etc."
The important word here is *structure*. Structure <> Layout. Layout
is - or rather *should* be - achieved through styling the underlying
HTML markup.
The intention of the HTML specification was never to produce a
document layout engine, but to produce a document *structure* engine.
The reasoning behind this was (and still is), that layout should be
(and is) controlled at the client (which it still is). Witness how
the same web page (however "well styled" or marked up) will always
have minor differences between different browsers and operating
systems combinations.
Moreover, anybody can choose to tell their browser - the decent ones
at least - to ignore styling elements entirely, or to turn off
graphics or other content, and thus break 'the layout'.
In your previous 'incomprehensible' web page example, that is
precisely what occurred. You *styled* all the elements to *make* them
incomprehensible for whatever reason. When I turned off CSS in my
browser, it was prefectly - although boringly - legible and lucid.
That's the whole point... that layout and style are controlled *at
the client*, and not necessarily by the designer. As designers, all
we can do is to 'give hints' to the browser as to how they should be
displayed.
Sure HTML is *necessary* to produce a layout for a web page, and a
layout will not exist without HTML, but you can't have an HTML layout
*without* styling of some form either through CSS or other means.
and said:The
W3C's (which, of course is a vast cooperative venture between
designers and other interested parties, and thus representative of
the wider web development community) preferred recommendation is that
we should use HTML for structural markup, and to use CSS to style
those structural elements.
The way that table use for layout developed as 'acceptable use' was,
that in the 90s there wasn't much of an alternative. We were forced
firstly by lack of a CSS specification, then lack of browser support
for said specification to use an alternate means to 'lay out' our
pages. We've gradually evolved past that of course, and we now have a
method of styling our markup that (an I reiterate) allows us to stick
more closely to the intention of purpose of HTML, and to return
control of layout and presentation style to the browser, which is how
it should be.
You wouldn't say you would use bricks to design a house, in the same
way that you wouldn't use HTML to produce a layout.
This refutes the "established principle" that css is for presentation
not layout.
Obviously though, without html there is only text and the only
layout possibly existing is in the manner the text was typed. Html
provides headings, paragraphs, list-forms, etc, etc, etc, and that
is surely layout regardless whether some here call it "structure" or
not.
What I don't understand is why such a simple casual remark
should cause such controversy.
Awful said:You're attributing a meaning to the word "layout" which doesn't hold
water.
Layout may be modified by the client, yes, but it is established by the
author.
No. The layout reverts to its pristine form, unadulterated by what
could be ill-advised attempts at adjustment.
My point. The html establishes layout.
Css is very powerful and can change many things about a web page but it
is a non sequitur to imply that it negates the layout functions of
html.
Well, if you consider the innate behavior of certain elements like <p>
and <hx> styling, this is true in the empirical sense.
I'm basically equating structure with layout while you seem to have a
different opinion. So pretend I said "Html is primarily for structure".
Oh balls, what a crap analogy! Everyone always uses html to produce a
layout
Awful said:This refutes the "established principle" that css is for presentation
not layout.
You wouldn't say you would use bricks to design a house, in the same
way that you wouldn't use HTML to produce a layout.
This refutes the "established principle" that css is for presentation
not layout.
<H1> is a structural element; it gives no indication about
presentation. It could be larger, it could be a different
colour, it could be a different level of (possibly negative)
indentation, etc..
<P> indicates a block of text; it says nothing about its
presentation. It could be justified, it could be centred, it could
even not be displayed.
dorayme said:Yes, indeed it is. (Why do I get the sneaking feeling the poster you
reply to here is our old friend Boji?)
Harlan Messinger said:There is no *inherent* layout.
For example, if asked you would be unable
to tell us what the unadulterated, pristine layout is for a UL with its
nested LIs; and, in fact, the default layout for lists differs by
browser.
If someone hands me eggs to make for breakfast but doesn't specify how
he wants them cooked, by default I will make an omelette out of them.
Someone else might, without specific instructions, choose to scramble
them; another might boil them. All sorts of things can be done with an
egg. By default, the chef decides which thing; the person placing the
order can override the chef. The egg does not have an implicit cooking
function.
These elements have no "innate behavior". Quick: what's the innate
behavior of <h1>? Then consider your answer in light of the original
monotype, single-font-size, single font-weight environment in which HTML
was first used, where there was no such thing as, say, multiple,
concurrent font sizes in a display, or boldfacing.
"Jonathan N. Little said:Because he is...
You prove that it can't be.
Raymond said:I read:
HTML - Layout
HTML layout is very basic. Not many options exist with the body tag
alone. Tables on the other hand are the bread and butter of HTML
layouts. Any element may be placed inside of a table including tables
themselves.
on the link i given:
http://www.tizag.com/htmlT/htmllayout.php
So why they speak about "HTML - Layout" if layout in not in the HTML
world ?
This, from the link below, looks a bit out of date these days! Tables....
HTML layout is very basic. Not many options exist with the body tag
alone. Tables on the other hand are the bread and butter of HTML
layouts. Any element may be placed inside of a table including tables
themselves.
on the link i given:
http://www.tizag.com/htmlT/htmllayout.php
So why they speak about "HTML - Layout" if layout in not in the HTML
world ?
dorayme said:Don't be too sure of this.
Well put, an articulate statement - at long last - from the
fundamentalist camp of the absolute separation of content from
presentation. Moreover, one that is demonstrably false.
I can tell you what the unadulterated layout is. No, it is not some
simple one thing. Yes it is a bit complicated. But this complicatedness
does not make it untrue. Would you mind very much if I used the example
of an HTML page that includes 8 paragraphs as an example, it requiring
simply less words to show the *kind of mistake* you make?
Let me introduce a useful concept to those unfamiliar with such a thing,
'design space'. When you fire up a browser with a blank window, there
there are uncountable possible ways to fill that design space with
pixels. The set of possibilities that include eight paragraphs is also
uncountable.
You are free to think of this in relation to one visual browser at one
size setting at one resolution. But you don't have to. Everything I say
applies equally to the vastly more complicated picture of different
browsers and different human modalities. The whole lot is simply a
vaster design space.
Now here is the point you miss and can be said, loosely of course, to be
the cause of your error: the set of possible pixel *permutations* for
displaying 8 paragraphs is vastly more circumscribed than the set of
permutations of pixels. It is this circumscribed set that is the
inherent layout of the element.
You might well wonder how a humble, not particularly mathematically
inclined human author could possibly understand the idea of the
semantics of an HTML if this is the true picture. There is no real
problem here though, the human brain's main strength is pattern
recognition. Pattern recognition is the ability to discern a pattern
from untold billions of possibilities.
The HTML paragraph element is a feed for browsers to display something
that humans recognise as a paragraph pattern,
it is mostly to do with
setting off clumps of contiguous sentences from each other with top and
bottom margins (but let us not go into details)
If someone was sitting at the breakfast table and saw a menu with tick
boxes next to Egg, Bacon, Coffee, Tea, ... and he ticked "Egg" and you
brought him a beautifully painted egg in a glass case, you would be
making a big mistake. He would not recognise it as something he ordered.
The 8 paragraphs that the client sends the web author to make appear in
a webpage do not have implicit web appearance functions. They could be
printed and the authors kids could cut them up and stick the tiny words
in them on the walls in a kind of painting. The author is meant to make
the paragraphs appear as paragraphs in a web page and we know how he
does this. He does this because browsers, as it were, understand
paragraph elements as being certain presentational patterns.
Presentation IS layout.
Harlan Messinger said:I'm absolutely certain of it.
A nevertheless infinite number of possibilities is contrary to the
notion of *an* *inherent* layout. Are there bullets? What do they look
like? How big are they? How do they align vertically with the first line
of text? Or are they aligned with the vertical middle of the list item?
Are the bullets left-aligned with the content box of the parent
container or are do they themselves have an inherent padding (or
margin!)? Is there extra vertical spacing between the bullet items? What
is the "inherent" offset between the bullet and the left edge of the
text? Of two layouts, one which would be a reasonable one on a GUI and
one which would be reasonable on a non-graphical display, which is the
"inherent" one?
Yes, it *is* about alternatives. You can certainly see them in differentBut there is no *inherent* layout for that. Even in paper-based display,
is a paragraph inherently displayed with the first line indented, and no
extra vertical spacing? Or are all the lines inherently left-aligned,
with extra vertical spacing used to separate the paragraphs? Or both?
The paragraph is a structural element. Here are two layout choices, and
neither is the *inherent* one. They are simply two alternatives.
Not quite clear of the case you describe. A page where the paragraphsAnother way to show that this is so is to consider a school child's
essay that is divided visually into what look like paragraphs, but which
the teacher marks up all over the place to inform the student that his
paragraph divisions don't correspond with the logical progression of the
narrative. The teacher is able to discern the paragraphs logically,
because they are structural and not presentational elements, independent
of the essay's layout.
To be fair to me, I was always saying that the inherent choice was notYou are mistaking "some choices would clearly not be correct" to imply
"there is an inherent choice".
No. We conventionally--because easy comprehension calls for it--apply a
presentational treatment to indicate the paragraph structure. There is
no *inherent* presentation.
Here's XML markup for items in a purchase:
<order>
<item product="39283" quantity="3" color="red" unitPrice="32.99"
discountPercent="15"/>
<item product="83929" quantity="1" size="M" color="blue"
unitPrice="8.49"/>
</order>
What's its inherent layout? There is none. It's an order, it's just
data. A document, like an order, is just data. Granted, moreso than an
order, a document is usually conceived with the purpose of being
displayed, but that doesn't alter the fact that like an order, or like a
product catalog, or like a university course catalog, in its HTML form
it is structured data. You can display it any way you like; despite the
existence of particular conventions for certain components of a
document, there is generally choice among several such conventions for
any particular element, and then there is a large amount of variability
for details. There is no one inherent layout.
dorayme said:Not quite clear of the case you describe. A page where the paragraphs
are there but not obviously there in appearance? What has the order of
the paras got to do with them being recognised as paras? Sorry?
Logical order of an essay, for example, seems to me to be an author's
job, not a browser's. No elements will deliver logical order. The author
must deliberately use HTML order or else CSS positioning to achieve
this.
To be fair to me, I was always saying that the inherent choice was not
utterly simple and unitary. It is the set of the relevant possibilities.
We organise and browsers deliver presentational treatments because there
is no other way of doing things. You seem to imply that there is some
alternative way to communicate human meaning? But perhaps I
misunderstand you.
Well, I was not talking about such a complex thing as whole page layout,
content as a whole. I was thinking we have confined ourselves to
particular elements. What does it mean to say that a P has a paragraph
semantics? And you should know my answer to this by now. Larger
questions of whole page layout vis-à-vis content viewed as some whole is
another more complex thing to be talked about another time.
Nevertheless, let this not stop me from adding these remarks. I bristle
at your saying "It's an order" followed by "it's just data". These are
not just anything but have quite some analysis behind them to be
understood more thoroughly. It is not meaningless or random data. It has
a structure. And this structure can be brought out in many different
alternative presentations. But there is no ghostly thing called the
content that can be sensibly separated from *all* presentations. I am
interested in the business at the point the author chooses an
appropriate element. And to talk about what this choice entails.
When a client says to the webpage author to tell the punters that the
client's sugar is white and this price, the rice, brown, and that price,
and so on, the author has no element that will display this information
in the simple way that a P will display a number of sentences. The
author cannot just throw the information into the table element (as one
does with a P).
He needs to very carefully sort out the list items (OK data points if
you must) and put the information into the cells and rows and make
decisions - there and then, *not* later to be "styled" - about how he
wants to present the information. He cannot put it into a table without
*serious* presentational decisions while doing it. He must vertical or
horizontal, for a start. He does this in the HTML!
Imagine the child's story has a logical structure, but the child doesn't
really have a handle on that fact and hasn't made the connection
betweeen that structure and the teacher's rule about dividing the text
up into something called "paragraphs" every so often. So the visible
breaks don't correspond with the structural paragraphs. The teacher
knows this because the teacher isn't fooled by the breaks.
When someone speaks to you at length, you are probably quite capable of
dividing his words up into paragraphs without any presentational clues
at all.
He does not absolutely have to specify the presentation, he knows theIf he doesn't specify the presentation with CSS, then he isn't
specifying the presentation. A given browser will do with the HTML
whatever it wants to, so woe to him if he thinks he's specifying a
particular presentation by using HTML alone.
the lovely and said:The teacher can better organise the story because he reads it
effortlessly by imposing, in effect as it were, an imaginary CSS sheet
on it. So are we making progress here?
Hmm...let me take a run at this. In English, the paragraph is the basic
unit of composition. The mature reader or listener can discern where the
paragraphs are, even if presentational breaks are put in the wrong places.
The issue I have with the example is that few children will be sufficiently
organized in their thought processes and sufficiently skilled in composition
to write discernable paragraphs, wherever they put the breaks. A better
example would be if we took an essay by a mature writer and started a new P
element every four sentences. Discerning readers would soon realize
something was wrong, and many of them could, with a high degree of accuracy,
restore the author's paragraphing.
Parsing engines just are not good enough to do that yet. Marking text up is
giving machines clues about the structure of the text. We can fool the
machines if we want to. We can put word salad in P and the machine will do
whatever it is supposed to do with P, but that does not so much word salad
into a paragraph.
Someone else, a keen slightly older kid, who simply comes across the
story in a pile at the back of his newly occupied house interested in
stories might have quite some trouble, not having the teacher's skills
in spotting how better it should have been set out. The teacher knows
the child or that it is a child... the point is still not *thoroughly
clear* to me.I gave an example recently of a web page where I tried hard to mimic
some sort of 'delivery of HTML through a browser to a human unmediated
by any presentational aspect'.
Of course you cannot do it. HTML is for machines, not for humans. HTML is
abstract because the same markup can be used for print, a screen browser, a
speech browser (not just a screen reader), or an android speaker. True
enough some elements, such as TABLE are very difficult to render in other
media. The android speaker, at least to the limit of its digits, can
count off elements in OL with its robotic fingers. But what is the right
way to render a hyperlink in print? You cannot click printer paper or expect
tool tips to popup as you read a print flyer.
There are plenty of challenges in finding the effective way to render HTML
in the various media, but I find it hard to believe that anyone thinks that
messing with the HTML to suit the needs of one particular medium is the
right way to confront those challenges. Of course, in some cases, the right
presentation is no presentation. I have heard thousands of lectures and
speeches in my life, but I cannot recall hearing a heading in any of them.
Our android speaker would probably do well to hide headings, and so forth.
My conclusion was the very opposite of
yours. It was an example of the essential uselessness of supposing an
abstraction of HTML from some minimal presentation. Where is it now?
Here:
Good luck in trying to work out where the paragraphs are!Naturally, it helps enormously that I wrote in a logical manner. But
even so, would a reader get which are my *actual* paragraphs? Readers
would likely differ on how they divide the mess, at least slightly. But
this is totally climbing the wrong tree. I was talking of delivering my
actual paragraphs and not some interpretation of various readers.
Imagine how George Bush would have divided it all. It might have looked
like an argument *for* prohibition by the time he had done. <g>
Of course we have PRE for poets and schizophrenics.
Lars Eighner said:In our last episode,
the lovely and said:Hmm...let me take a run at this. In English, the paragraph is the basic
unit of composition. The mature reader or listener can discern where the
paragraphs are, even if presentational breaks are put in the wrong places.
The issue I have with the example is that few children will be sufficiently
organized in their thought processes and sufficiently skilled in composition
to write discernable paragraphs, wherever they put the breaks. A better
example would be if we took an essay by a mature writer and started a new P
element every four sentences. Discerning readers would soon realize
something was wrong, and many of them could, with a high degree of accuracy,
restore the author's paragraphing.
A better example, maybe. But they all are not quite barking up the right
tree. I am meaning soon to make clearer what cats are up what trees,
there is some confusion at the moment.
But, in the meantime, I was interested in what you said last Lars. To
avoid cheating, by looking at the source of the UL I supplied earlier,
take:
<http://dorayme.netweaver.com.au/analyseThis.html>
And encourage someone, a prohibitionist politician preferably <g>, to
read it and see if they get the result of
<http://members.optushome.com.au/droovies/opinion/drugLaws.html>
Try to encourage them to do this widescreen on 24" monitor and see how
many could, at what cost in time and effort.
But what would the point of this exercise be, really? My analysis is it
discerns various counterfactual truths, here is a lighter hearted
example:
If the website author had stopped being a clueless prat, he would have
set this out in such a way that human readers could understand the
writer's essay *relatively* effortlessly.
(This goes too if the writer had been a prat and dumped all his words in
an email to the website maker without any returns etc. Prat, because he
should have asked his client to resubmit it in normal standard essay
form. No, hang on! ... maybe not so pratish if he was on an hourly
rate...)
Harlan's and your examples are attempting to point to some hidden
structure, something real, something "contentful" in some sense,
something that must be distinguished from anything to do with
presentation. This seemingly meaningful thing has - you allege - no
presentational qualities at all because, as your examples are trying to
show, they can be discerned by the skilful human mind in spite of
presentation, *through* (as in mental x-ray) the presentation.
But we are going to get complicated now. How far back am I forced to
argue with you guys that there are some intrinsic presentational
characteristics to semantic HTML elements?
Let us imagine a thinker, writer, webpage author rolled into one. He
thinks and thinks about some topic. He recalls what he has heard people
say and what people have written. A huge jumble of stuff full of mental
imagery. He adds his own. He sorts it this way and that in his mind. He
writes down a few things or speaks into his dictaphone (Bertrand Russell
once dictated a whole book to his secretary from his mind and very few
editing changes were made before publication. Lesser mortals do a lot of
editing)
Even at this early stage, I say, he is dealing with things that have
some shape, not some spooky thing in itself. He shapes his thoughts by
shaping his language and that means literally spatially and aurally. It
goes on and on till something tidier emerges, patterns that enable the
thinker himself to be satisfied with his thought and patterns known to
be the best medium for human communication. Presentational pattern is
part and parcel of the heart of meaning. You cannot separate out some
intrinsic set of appearances from the idea of meaning in the end because
it is the stuff of meaning and thought.
Parsing engines just are not good enough to do that yet.
What do you mean "yet"? The fact, Lars, is that not in our lifetimes
will they be able to do so and if there are lifetimes in which they can,
the parsing engines will be part of a remarkable robotic intelligence
matching yours.
Marking text up is
giving machines clues about the structure of the text. We can fool the
machines if we want to. We can put word salad in P and the machine will do
whatever it is supposed to do with P, but that does not so much word salad
into a paragraph.
Of course you cannot do it. HTML is for machines, not for humans.
As I have been saying all along in this and other threads, it comes down
to the tags triggering in a dumb dumb way suitable presentational
reactions all by themselves, *no help needed* from author CSS. Humans
have programmed the basic appearances in via default style sheets or
hard wired coding (I am imagining the latter in older browsers).
HTML is
abstract because the same markup can be used for print, a screen browser, a
speech browser (not just a screen reader), or an android speaker. True
enough some elements, such as TABLE are very difficult to render in other
media. The android speaker, at least to the limit of its digits, can
count off elements in OL with its robotic fingers. But what is the right
way to render a hyperlink in print? You cannot click printer paper or expect
tool tips to popup as you read a print flyer.
Let's put tables aside, I want us to focus on the crown jewels of your
fundamentalist castle, nice clean allegedly non presentational elements
like Ps and ULs. The abstractness, with respect to you all because you
are not evil like the taliban, which you are seeing is not inconsistent
with the idea I am trying to convince you of, namely there are intrinsic
presentational aspects. And my take on it is that you are not seeing
that this abstractness is actually because there is more than one simple
appearance or presentation involved. It is more complicated than this
and involves the set containing simple basic appearances as I have tried
to outline to Harlan under fire of his clever questioning.
There are plenty of challenges in finding the effective way to render HTML
in the various media, but I find it hard to believe that anyone thinks that
messing with the HTML to suit the needs of one particular medium is the
right way to confront those challenges. Of course, in some cases, the right
presentation is no presentation. I have heard thousands of lectures and
speeches in my life, but I cannot recall hearing a heading in any of them.
Our android speaker would probably do well to hide headings, and so forth.
"Of course, in some cases, the right presentation is no presentation."
There is no "of course" about the matter! According to me, no
presentation at all is no meaning either.
And nothing I have said should imply that "messing with the HTML to suit
the needs of one particular medium is the right way to confront" any
challenge whatsoever.
Want to reply to this thread or ask your own question?
You'll need to choose a username for the site, which only take a couple of moments. After that, you can post your question and our members will help you out.