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Groups > comp.text > #16

presentational vs. structural markup

Cross-posted to 3 groups.

Followups directed to: comp.text, news.software.readers

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>>>>> Anton Shepelev <anton.txt@g{oogle}mail.com> writes:
>>>>> Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz:

	[Cross-posting to news:comp.text, and dropping news:news.misc
	from Followup-To:.]

 >> Eric Raymond's DocBook into:

 >>> In a structural-markup language, you would tell the formatter to
 >>> emphasize the word:

 >>>     All your base <emphasis>are</emphasis> belong to us!

 >> No; that's still marking up the text for presentation.  With
 >> structural markup you tag the text to indicate its semantics, e. g.,
 >> ":title.Return of the foo".  That might cause emphasis, quoting or
 >> something else.  It might cause automatic indexing.  It might do
 >> something else.  And it might do different things depending on the
 >> context.

 > I think you are nitpicking here, because the tag <emphasis> may be
 > endowed with any meaning by means of a style sheet.  Similarly you
 > could have a <title> tag.

	There's one more issue with the TeX approach, which is not as
	much of structural vs. presentational kind, as it's of code
	vs. data one.

	Namely, while it's possible to parse DocBook, documents in
	TeX-based markup are essentially /unparsable/.  For instance,
	while it's possible to extract all the section headings from a
	DocBook document, it's impossible to do so, in general, for a
	LaTeX one, as the LaTeX document in question can introduce its
	own commands all along the way.  Consider, e. g.:

\let \sec=\section

	The same applies to *roff, and it's precisely the reason that
	various *roff "viewers" have to either rely on an implementation
	of the language (such as GNU Troff), or support only a
	particular macro package (as in the case of Emacs' M-x woman.)

	On the contrary, the software working with DocBook documents
	doesn't have to rely upon, say, the DocBook XSL stylesheets.

[...]

 >>> the interface of a macro package corresponds to a structured markup
 >>> language

 >> Some macro packages are strictly presentational.

 > Yes.  Structural mark-up is an abstraction from the lower-level
 > presentational mark-up.  For example, TeX is presentational and LaTeX
 > is strutural.

	Actually, LaTeX is structural, plain TeX is presentational, and
	TeX is the macro processing language in which both of them are
	implemented (as are, e. g., ConTeXt and certain GNU Texinfo
	"conversions.")

-- 
FSF associate member #7257

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presentational vs. structural markup Ivan Shmakov <oneingray@gmail.com> - 2012-05-04 21:21 +0700
  Re: presentational vs. structural markup Anton Shepelev <anton.txt@g{oogle}mail.com> - 2012-05-04 18:52 +0400
    Re: presentational vs. structural markup tlvp <mPiOsUcB.EtLlLvEp@att.net> - 2012-05-04 19:54 -0400
    Followup-To: not equal to Newsgroups: Ivan Shmakov <oneingray@gmail.com> - 2012-05-05 10:17 +0700
    Re: presentational vs. structural markup Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz <spamtrap@library.lspace.org.invalid> - 2012-05-05 20:28 -0400
      Re: presentational vs. structural markup "Adam H. Kerman" <ahk@chinet.com> - 2012-05-06 04:05 +0000
        Re: presentational vs. structural markup tlvp <mPiOsUcB.EtLlLvEp@att.net> - 2012-05-06 00:57 -0400
        Re: presentational vs. structural markup Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz <spamtrap@library.lspace.org.invalid> - 2012-05-06 17:40 -0400

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