Re: On being web-friendly and why info must die

[Yuri Khan]

On Wed, Dec 17, 2014 at 9:30 AM, Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote:

> I have been assuming this is still necessary, but maybe it is not.
> If HTML-Info can represent these distinctions with fonts, the same
> as in TeX, maybe we don't need semantic markup any more.  Maybe
> the same appearance can be used in all formats on line and on paper.

Appearance is not everything. As a user of a hypothetical HTML-Info, I
want to be able to restyle (customize the appearance of) elements with
different semantics differently and conveniently. That requires
semantic HTML (either with semantic HTML elements such as <kbd>, <em>
and <code> or with CSS classes where no directly suitable element is
available). And that, in turn, requires either semantic source or a
magic semantic-deriving preprocessor.

Now I have been involved in several magic semantic-deriving projects,
and I tell you, it’s not a pretty job.