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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:18:32 ADT
Perry E. Metzger (perry@piermont.com)
Tue, 16 Jun 1998 01:26:00 -0400
Stephen Dennis writes:
> PDF and HTML purposes are closely related...just like the purpose of
> PostScript and PCL are closely related.
That is simply untrue. HTML is an SGML derived mechanism. It is
designed to give structure to a document but not to specify layout --
it is also *not* a mechanism capable of describing vector output. It
was originally intended to describe the content of the document --
i.e. "this is a title, this is a paragraph, this is a code example..."
without in any way constraining the display. The use of grotesque HTML
kludges to force particular kinds of display, especially by hacking in
lots of bit map images, has become necessary.
PDF is essentially equivalent in what it can describe, layout-wise, to
Postscript. As such, what it does is describe how a document is set,
not what its structuring conventions are. This is an utterly different
purpose than that which HTML was designed for.
Perry
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:18:32 ADT