Re: Formatting Options in HTML?

Dave_Raggett (dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com)
Wed, 19 May 93 11:46:27 BST


Bill Jansen (Wed, 12 May 1993 19:39:23 PDT) says:

> Rather than add things like <CENTER> and <FLUSH-RIGHT> to the HTML
> document, it seems that this sort of thing should be decided by the user
> in their browser. That is, probably most text should be filled and both
> right and left justified by default, unless the user specifies
> otherwise. The user should be able to specify things like this for
> different region-types of all documents, not for specific regions of
> specific documents.

I agree with Bill in leaving the style settings to the browser.
The long term success of HTML and WWW will depend on our resisting
the temptation to add style information to HTML. This is critically
important to supporting a wide range of document types, and continued
presentation independance on a wide and evolving range of platforms.
Have you see the screen sizes on PDAs?

We have a chance to come up with a ubiquitous world beating standard.
This will depend on presentation independence, lightweight processing
demands and our skill at understanding people's real needs for a wide
range of on-line and paper documents.

Dave Raggett