On Sat, 21 Apr 2018 12:59:16 -0500 Nate Bargmann <n...@n0nb.us> wrote:
> But why do we focus on presentation when authoring a document? Because the document we see is what we're creating. The only purpose of the document is to be read, and appearance matters to the reader. The reader assuredly doesn't care about semantic markup. Semantic markup is an abstraction that assists the author. It can ensure that semantically similar things -- section headers, quotations, etc. -- are rendered consistently. It can help -- somewhat -- in rendering the same input text pleasantly in different output formats. It can help indexing programs and such knit together different documents in ways that are useful to the user (and thus to the author). There's no Higher Good honored by using semantic markup. It's a tool to use if it gets you where you want to go. Ultimately, though, you want your text to be read, and it is altogether fitting and proper that you be concerned with its appearance. --jkl
