Structure · 27 December 2002
There is now a fair bit of documentation available for Textile – and an entire second layer of tips and tricks – though I fear nowhere near enough about why it’s so useful, or why being fussy about semantic structure is so important.
An uninspired example: it’s easy to make text sloped (though not always easy to make it italic, but that’s another matter) on a web page, but what implicit meaning does this differentiated text have? Most readers can discern from context when a writer is quoting Tristram Shandy, or is pissed right off, or is simply lamenting les temps morts. But, when gleaning what a page is about, how does a search engine or web archiver, no matter how powerful its algorithms, discern that the first is a citation, the second is emphasis, the third mere style? Or a blind person using a screen reader, who has no such visual context?
If one uses, as I did above, <cite>, <em> and <i> tags, the examples are no longer merely different from the flow of roman text, their difference has structural meaning.
Of course that’s just the beginning. I was going to write more, but I see that Mark Pilgrim has, as usual, come up with an infinitely more powerful example. Hmph.
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