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With regards to separating style and content (and layout): It seems to me that HTML is no longer the purest form of content. I've been thinking that having you

by adregan 12y ago

With regards to separating style and content (and layout): It seems to me that HTML is no longer the purest form of content. I've been thinking that having your content in an API (or markdown or text files in the case of static site generators), using HTML for the layout (inline styles maybe, or JS driven positioning), and CSS for the styling of the content creates a more flexible and future friendly flow. Then stylesheets could be far simpler. Layout needs to move to a new layer of the stack perhaps.

T-hawk 12y ago
The thing is, layout is content. Even right here on HN. One comment being a reply to another is indicated visually with a level of indentation. That's semantic meaning. A comment saying "I disagree" carries vastly different meaning depending on what comment is its parent. If you remove layout from HN, you remove threading from conversations and lose or change the meaning of posts. We use layout to indicate meaning in all sorts of ways. Even a simple set of tabular data with two columns will depend on visual layout. An item for sale needs to be next to the correct price for that item, for example. An image with a caption depends on having the caption spatially near the image. I agree that it feels like layout belongs in a new layer of the stack. But how do you do that? You'd need all sorts of semantic meaning to be expressible in the data structures from the API. Things like parent/child post hierarchy, or item/price, or image/caption, or any number of other relations. How do you generalize that? This sounds tantamount to and as intractable as strong AI in the area of knowledge processing.
- sp332 12y ago
  You could have a semantic relationship between two comments, and then have lots of options for how you want to style it. They're separate. You could draw lines between them, or indent them by various amounts, or draw a box around them, etc. Styling is how you express the semantic meaning in a particular context, but changing the styling shouldn't change the semantics.
wefarrell 12y ago
Sounds a lot like the web of the mid 2000's with XML and XSLT files.

by adregan 12y ago

T-hawk 12y ago

The thing is, layout is content. Even right here on HN. One comment being a reply to another is indicated visually with a level of indentation. That's semantic meaning. A comment saying "I disagree" carries vastly different meaning depending on what comment is its parent. If you remove layout from HN, you remove threading from conversations and lose or change the meaning of posts. We use layout to indicate meaning in all sorts of ways. Even a simple set of tabular data with two columns will depend on visual layout. An item for sale needs to be next to the correct price for that item, for example. An image with a caption depends on having the caption spatially near the image. I agree that it feels like layout belongs in a new layer of the stack. But how do you do that? You'd need all sorts of semantic meaning to be expressible in the data structures from the API. Things like parent/child post hierarchy, or item/price, or image/caption, or any number of other relations. How do you generalize that? This sounds tantamount to and as intractable as strong AI in the area of knowledge processing.

sp332 12y ago
You could have a semantic relationship between two comments, and then have lots of options for how you want to style it. They're separate. You could draw lines between them, or indent them by various amounts, or draw a box around them, etc. Styling is how you express the semantic meaning in a particular context, but changing the styling shouldn't change the semantics.

wefarrell 12y ago

Sounds a lot like the web of the mid 2000's with XML and XSLT files.