> I had a nice long email written up to make this point but since my > webmail ate it I thought I would just be rather terse about it and go > into more details if required. Heh - been there, done that - waay to many times!! > There are two fundamentally different kinds of text documents. There > are PDF, Postscript, Word, etc. These are presentation formats. > They > are intended to be "pixel-perfect". On the other hand, there are > HTML, > XML, CSV, which are content, not format specifications. They are > intended to be represented in an application/device dependent way. Though I agree with you on the fact that different text formats, serves different purposes - It is not correct that html is data only format. Infact, this is one of the reasons for xml. Html is a presentation AND data format. If it were only a content format, why would I then say: <p align="center">this is my paragraph</p> The above line clearly contains both data 'this is my paragraph' and layout data. however, xml and csv is clearly content only. > HTML has gotten a lot of abuse in this respect because people use it > as > a presentation format, but it isn't. It actually is - it has been this for a long time. However many would like to use it as content only, and then apply css to format the data. from w3c: "As HTML matures, more and more of its presentational elements and attributes are being replaced by other mechanisms, in particular style sheets." > So, in summary, I think it's reasonable to have two different types > of > text, "presentation text" and "content text". Perhaps. Wouldn't it be better to decouple the formats by saying this part is content, and this part is formatting?. Much the same as xml & xsl, or stylededit ascii text, and it's attributes specifying formatting. from w3c: " Experience has shown that separating the structure of a document from its presentational aspects reduces the cost of serving a wide range of platforms, media, etc., and facilitates document revisions." But let's just for sake of argument assume that we have a content and a presentation text format. How would this be presented generically to the translator? We need to define this illusive generic format... we could perhaps borrow from someone else? /Brian Matzon