[pmwiki-users] Re: Re: <div> markup suggestions...?

[John Rankin]

On Wednesday, 2 March 2005 9:03 AM, chr at home.se wrote:
>On Tue, 1 Mar 2005, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
>
>> rather than having to write out (:div class='Patrick':).  Typing
>> the extra "(:div class=" is likely to get annoying.
>
>Why do we have to call it 'div'? That's not going to be very 
>understandable for most users... would it make more sense to write 
>something like:
>
>	(:style Patrick:)
>	Bla ...
>
>	Bla...
>	(:styleend:)
>
>I guess 'style' could be 'blockstyle' if that aspect needs to be 
>emphasized, or borrowing from LaTeX, it could be 'env' (for
>environment).

On the whole, I think it's a bad idea to present divisions as
'styles'; rather they are a form of semantic markup, which
allows authors to ascribe /meaning/ to a block of text. How
the semantics are represented is a separate consideration.

This is one reason why I prefer symbols, such as

/patrick/
bla...

bla...
//

This allows those who think in terms of styles to see the
markup as a way of styling text, while those who follow a 
semantic approach can interpret the markup as giving meaning.


-- 
JR
--
John Rankin