semantics vs. styles was Re: [pmwiki-users] Re: floating box on the right

Radu radu at monicsoft.net
Sun Mar 27 11:53:45 CST 2005


At 06:52 PM 3/25/2005, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
>HTML is like a programming language where authors aren't allowed
>to define their own functions -- you're strictly limited to the ones
>explicitly defined by the language.  PmWiki tries to get away from that
>by allowing site administrators and authors the ability to define
>new (semantics-based) markups that are appropriate to whatever
>documents they happen to be writing.

Yep, I had the same problem ever since HTML was an academic exercise. So in 
my projects I always tried to allow users to create additional elements 
with their own semantics building on top of previously created elements and 
ultimately on the distribution medium (HTML, CSS, XML...).

The problem that many pro-standard people keep bringing up as a reason for 
the existence of standards and against ad-hoc objects is communication:
*without a standard, there would be no way from different systems to interact;
*having an all-encompassing standard (with all the ad-hoc objects built 
here and there) would make the parsers very heavy and open the way for 
conflicts (as we sometimes get when applying different recipes)

However, even standards evolved to allow the definition of ad-hoc objects 
(see css for stylistic semantics and xmlSchemas / custom DTDs for tag 
semantics). I do like it however how pmwiki makes it even easier and more 
interactive, with the (:define:) directive and Markup mechanism.


Cheers,
Radu
(www.monicsoft.net) 




More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list