🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <9208032015.AA16601@mammoth.Berkeley.EDU> DRMACRO@RALVM13.VNET.IBM.COM ("Dr. "Eliot Kimber" Macro") writes:
>Dan Connolly writes:
>
>>Descriptive markup (should we call it declarative markup?), in
>>contrast, implies no particular processing engine. It uses lexical
>>conventions to associate properties with content. Where a procedural
>>markup system would say "Set italics mode.  Draw these characters. Set
>>roman mode," a descriptive markup system would say, "these characters
>>are italic."
>
>The more interesting (I think) and useful abstraction is
>"these characters represent data of type X", totally divorced
>from any output specification.  That characters of type X may
>be set in italic in some styles is coincident and controlled
>purely by specifications outside the SGML document source
>itself, or applied via link process definitions.
>
This is the "structural vs. formatting" distinction. It is
relavent, but orthogonal to the "procedural vs. descriptive"
markup distinction.

The purpose of my article is to point out that SGML takes
a stand on the procedural/descriptive distinction, but leaves
the format/structure distinction to the application. i.e.
it's possible to construct an SGML formatting system, but it
will be a descriptive markup system nontheless.

I agree that applications should lean towards the structural
side of the format/structure distinction.

But let's not confuse the issues.

Dan