Re: link appearance and soft face properties

[Daniel Brockman <daniel@brockman.se>]

"Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:

> The distinction of soft from hard that I was driving at is, as I
> mentioned, the difference between using Emphasis and Bold markup
> tags: Emphasis text is intended to be displayed in different ways,
> depending on the context; Bold text is not. It is the difference
> between software and hardware. Softer vs harder is essentially later
> vs earlier binding.
>
> Such a distinction is old - you can see it in the design, for
> instance, of Tex/LaTex. Maybe there is a better name for it than
> "soft vs hard" - I don't know.

I'm used to ``semantic vs. presentational'' (very common in
web-related circles).

Semantic markup (e.g., emphasis) is part of the meaning of the text,
regardless of the way the text is displayed.  Presentational markup
(e.g., bold) is meaningless out of its presentational context.

There is a close analogy with source vs. object code.  The former is
more portable than the latter.  But the latter is directly usable,
while the former is mostly only used when editing the work.

-- 
Daniel Brockman <daniel@brockman.se>

   ``so really, we all have to ask ourselves: am i waiting for
     rms to do this?'' --- Thien-Thi Nguyen