In article <3d740ed7@news.povray.org> , Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg>  wrote:

>> Why?  Because this kind of layout hurts readability more than it helps!
>
>   Did you read my text about using and misusing? You are exaggerating, as
> people always do in this kind of flamewars: When I say that you could use
> a color to distinguish keywords from the rest of the text, you immediately
> jump with exaggerations about "20+ colors". That tactic is old and cheap,
> and convinces no-one.

Well, count the number of colors on your page.  There are really a lot.  If
you count on your page, there are alreday at least ten:

Every "button" consists of three, the background colors (two), the text
color, the link color, the followed link color, the section headers, the
separator color.

So, as you can see, even your fairly simple page has many colors.

>   Absolutely yes. Mathematical formulae have a clear layout in order to
> be easy to read and understand and to clearly differentiate them from the
> rest of the text. The layout of mathematical formulae is very fancy
> (because you can't get it with eg. a typewriter).
>   When you are looking for a certain formula in they papers, it's easy
> because of the layout.

Yes, mathemetical forumals use the same layout everywhere to convey their
structure.  They are a perfect example of structure turned into a specific
mostly universal layout everybody agrees upon.  They are a perfect example
how good layout should be:  To help follow the structure.  One could write
formulas by simply putting them in a long chains of words and numbers and
operators, but that would help nobody.  It would be much harder to find out
rules of precedence and such.  Yet it would still be possible.

>   But they did. Imagine that the formulae in Einstein's paper would have
> been written in ascii in C style...

Exactly!  Or imaggine anybody changing the layout of formulas.  You get a
mess.  Here we have the case where an almost perfect layout has been
developed by many people over centuries.  That is very different from
someone stitting down and saying: "Now I am going to invent the perfect
layout for my users".

>   I am completely read to make a test:
>   I can make two versions of the Q&T pages, one as it's currently and
> another with no CSS and all of your "layout" tags removed (ie. <i>, <b> etc).
> Then we can make a poll about which version do people prefer.

No, not remove.  You already mentioned how to do it correctly:  if you want
to emphazise something, use the em tag, if you want to make something stand
out, use the strong tag.  This way you separate layout from structure.

>   But this would demonstrate one point: According to you it's best for
> the readers to have the pages with no layout definitions. The votes would
> certainly prove the contrary.

No, you are still confusing layout and structure here.  You asked about the
tags before and I gave you the reference in the HTML 4.0 specification that
explained their difference:

Date: Tue, 03 Sep 2002 02:01:25 +0200
From: "Thorsten Froehlich" <tho### [at] trfde>
Newsgroups: povray.general
Subject: Re: povQ&T (aka. povVFAQ) new look
Message-ID: <3d73fbd6@news.povray.org>
Xref: news.povray.org povray.general:41833

>   (Well, let me guess: Most of the people are stupid, and only a very few
> enlightened people know what is the best thing to have... ;) )

No, but as you clearly show, most people did not even read the manual (HTML
4.0 specification, for example), but start doing web design.  If you make
mistakes using something because you did not read the manual, it is indeed
so that those who did read the manual will know more than those who did not.

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

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