Thorsten Froehlich <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:
> Well, for the author of the book there is no way to not make that decision.
> There is no alternative possible.  For the web there is this choice.  So why
> should the author enforce more on the read than absolutely necessary if
> he/she does not have to?

  It's not about enforcing, it's about helping. That's the whole point.

  The author can feel that his text is more readable and easier to understand
if he, for example, makes some things look more prominent than others (eg.
by defining a special font and/or color).
  For example, it could be easier to find pieces of example code in a longer
page if these parts can be seen with a quick look (eg. because they are
colored in some way or there's another easy-to-see layout which makes them
prominent). If the text uses special keywords, a special formatting for
them helps the reader to distinguish them from regular text (the author
could even have an introductory page explaining what do the different
fonts/colors mean).
  Thus all these things can be used by the author to help the viewer to
read his work better and easier. (Yes, of course these things can be
misused, but what couldn't? You could perfectly misuse the <h1> tag and
put the whole content of the page inside it. However, the point is not
how these features can be misused, but how they can be used to help the
author and the reader. The fact that something *can* be used in the
wrong way doesn't mean it can't be used in the right way.)

  What you basically want is to take these tools away from the author.
You don't want to give the author any way of defining things in his own
way in order to help the reader.
  I don't agree with this.
  What you are proposing is that the responsibility of deciding what is
important and what is not, and how important things should be viewed, is
transferred from the author to the reader. However, there's a big problem
here: The author knows what is important in his own work, but the reader
doesn't. The author knows that some specific thing should be emphasized
so that it can be seen more easily and make the text easier to read, but
the reader can't know this beforehand.

  Moreover, the text could have different types of things, which should be
distinguished from each other (by the reader). For example in HTML we
have the <code> block, but only one; what if we want different types
of <code> blocks which are clearly differentiated from each other?
Even if the reader would know this and would want to make the difference
apparent, he couldn't do it! However, the author can.
  As I said before, the author can help the reader to understand his text
more easily. Taking away the tools to achieve this is not a good thing
in my opinion.

-- 
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N(D)#end#end#macro M()<mod(D,13)-6mod(div(D,13)8)-3,10>#end blob{
N(11117333955)N(4254934330)N(3900569407)N(7382340)N(3358)N(970)}//  - Warp -

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