On Tue, 3 Sep 2002 01:56:09 +0100, Pandora wrote:
> "Thorsten Froehlich" <tho### [at] trfde> wrote in message
> news:3d740221@news.povray.org...
>> Well, if you insist that structure and layout are the same for you it is
>> pointless to argue with you.
> 
>     That's the problem though - structure and layout are essentially the
> same concept viewed at differing levels of abstraction.

Perhaps there's a language barrier here that nobody has yet perceived.
What Thorsten means when he says "structure" is that part of the document's
structure which is inherent in the content: where the paragraph breaks are,
where the section breaks are, and so on.  Moving those things arbitrarily
can significantly change the tone of the document.  "Layout," on the other
hand, is presentation: what the font will be, how emphasized text will be 
marked, how many columns the page will have, whether to use illuminated caps 
as the first letter of the first paragraph of a section, and so on.  

The way I see the distinction is this: if a change in the page affects
the way you read the text aloud, it's content.  If it doesn't affect
the way you read the text aloud, it's presentation.  This is just a rule
of thumb, though, so people creating exceptions for the sake of argument
will be mocked and ignored.

Sidebars and scare quotes are a separate thing; they're really separate
documents in their own right, and should be handled with meta-markup
such as, like it or not, frames (but not iframes; when Microsoft created
iframes, they at least partially missed the point of frames.)

User Interface elements like navigation bars should never be part of a 
document, unless the entire purpose of that document is to provide 
navigation.  Yes, that probably means you should use frames.  Even Lynx
supports frames now.  Other UI elements like the omnipresent "back to 
top" links that lazy and/or incompetent "designers" put on pages that 
present too much unrelated information should also be avoided.

-- 
#macro R(P)z+_(P)_(P)_(P+1)_(P+1)+z#end#macro Q(C,T)bicubic_patch{type 1u_steps
6v_steps 6R(1)R(3)R(5)R(7)pigment{rgb z}}#end#macro _(Y)#local X=asc(substr(C,Y
,1))-65;<T+mod(X,4)div(X,4)9>-2#end#macro O(T)Q("ABEFUQWS",T)Q("WSXTLOJN",T)#
end O(0)O(3)Q("JNKLCGCD",0)light_source{x 1}// ron### [at] povrayorg

Post a reply to this message