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Comment by jkoudys | Hacker News Reader

This proposal is trying to take a common web design pattern, MVC, and make it part of the official spec. HTML is a _markup language_, it's ridiculous to use it as anything but a semantic language.

Here's my HTML6 proposal: There’s a standard design pattern emerging via cascading style sheets, where content is styled directly via CSS. Everyone’s into it because the layout looks so much nicer.

Since this is so common now, can we implement this directly in the browsers via HTML so users can directly style their content without CSS? I propose adding a tag, so people can style their fonts, a <blink> tag so things can blink, and a fun <marquee> tag so content can scroll.

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> HTML is a _markup language_, it's ridiculous to use it as anything but a semantic language.

So which is it? A semantic language or a markup (syntax) language?

Why does it have to stay that way? (Even if the proposal is a bad one.)

It should stay close to what it is because it's fairly good at its job. To make it more than that would be to generalize it away from its job into some new job. This violates single responsibility. We've already learned our lesson with that and HTML; thus was born CSS.

Making a web standard for single page apps doesn't really seem necessary. Applications are by their nature different than web sites. A web site is a collection of content displayed largely as pages that are designated by a URI. An application is an abstraction over the page model that minimizes the transparent page/resource model with an opaque process flow model. HTML, as it stands, can be the V in MVC in either. Making it take on the M or C gains us little and stands to lose us much.

> HTML is a _markup language_

It might have been designed as a language for web based documents. Though this is not what the web is used for today, consumers want applications not documents. And we are already hacking away on top of those documents to give them that (despite the web not being intended as such).

> It might have been designed as a language for web based documents. Though this is not what the web is used for today, consumers want applications not documents.

They want applications and documents, or I do anyway. I spend more of my time online reading stuff than using GMail or whatever.

Consumers are given applications not documents.

Don't speak ill of people with or <center> infatuation as HN is built on these tags. At the time of writing this comment, there's around 300 tags on the page and over 100 <center> ones

So, basically watch what you say buddy :)

, I don't think there's an excuse. we know for sure that it is not out of incompetence but it was probably easier to write at the time and nobody bothered to fix it because it doesn't really matter.

For the <center>, it is probably not the case here as this is just a text based site but sometimes it is easier to center an image by that tag when your site is partitioned in many margins it is not as easy to center some stuff, or you might just prefer to add a tag.

I also like , it really makes more sense to me and easier to write. It doesn't really break anything either.

I wonder how many there are, like me, think that <center> and are actually really nice things to have?

Not many but they're deprecated/obsolete for a reason, don't you think?

Perhaps not many in the design community or front end devs, but I'd wager there are plenty of developers who love because it's what they've always used to do simple layouts so they can get back to the back end.

br is neither deprecated nor obsolete

HECK YEE! I even put classes in my tags so I can get at them and decide when and how they display!

HECK YES! I even put classes in my tags so I can get at them and decide when and how they display!

There's nothing wrong with font tags on HN. You might not realize that the pages served on this site are machine-generated!

I agree. Its just they could add a class to css, and instead of setting font tag to each element, just add the class. But of course, since they are generated in a loop anyway, there's no practical difference.

Just clicked "view source" on this page out of curiosity. I feel like I just traveled back in time to 1996.

hacker news is predominantly pre-CSS style code, e.g. the only CSS seems to be basic fonts and the upvote arrow, both of which the site would barely be different if run without CSS. Here's their only stylesheet: https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css?vaRvmIYYFOCsNxY80y43

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