Papers in PDF format

The Netscape extensions ushered in a new era of professional document design, but it hasn't all been for the best,
especially the round introduced with Netscape 2.0. HTML documents may have looked clunky back in 1993 but at least
they all worked the same. Users knew that if they saw something black, they should read it. If they saw something gray,
that would be the background. If they saw something blue, they should click on it. Unlike CD-ROMs, web sites did not
have sui generis navigation tools or colors that took a few minutes to learn. Web sites had user interface stability, the
same thing that made the Macintosh's pull-down menus so successful (because the print command was always in the
same place, even if it was sometimes grayed-out).
Netscape 1.1 allowed publishers to play with the background, text, link, and visited link colors. Oftentimes, a graphic
designer would note that most of the text on a page was hyperlinks and therefore just make all the text black.
Alternatively, he or she would choose a funky color for a background and then three more funky colors for text, link,
and visited link. Either way, users have no way of knowing what is a hyperlink and what isn't. Oftentimes, designers get
bored and change these colors even within a site.
Very creative publishers managed to use the Netsacpe 1.1 extensions to create Web documents that looked like book or
magazine pages. They did this by dropping in thousands of references to transparent GIFs, painful for them but even
more painful for the non-Netscape-enhanced user.
Frames, introduced with Netscape 2.0, give the user the coldest plunge into unfamiliar user interface yet. The "Back"
button no longer undoes the last mouse click; it exits the site altogether. The space bar no longer scrolls down; the user
has to first click the mouse in the frame containing the scroll bar. Screen space, the user's most precious resource, is
wasted with ads, navigation "aids" that he has never seen before, and other items extraneous to the requested document.
Thanks to all of these Netscape extensions, the Web abounds with multi-frame, multi-color, multi-interfaced sites.
Unfortunately, it still isn't possible to format a novel readably. I'll use The English Patient [Ondaatje 1992] as an
example. Although its narrative style is about as unconventional as you'd expect for a Booker Prize winner, it is
formatted very typically for a modern novel.
Sections are introduced with a substantial amount of whitespace (3 cm), a large capital letter about twice the height of
the normal font, and the first few words in small caps. Paragraphs are typically separated by their first line being
indented about three characters. Chronological or thematic breaks are denoted by vertical whitespace between
paragraphs, anywhere from one line's worth to a couple of centimeters. If the thematic break has been large, it gets a lot
of whitespace and the first line of the next paragraph is not indented. If the thematic break is small, it gets only a line of
whitespace and the first line of the next paragraph is indented. So the "author's intent" needs to be expressed with tags
like . The "designer's intent" needs to be expressed with equations like
.
Style sheets, officially adopted as a standard on March 5, 1996 by most browser makers, make this possible in almost
the manner I've described. I asked Hakon W. Lie, one of the authors of the style sheet proposal, for the most tasteful
way to format The English Patient. He came back with the following:
The cascading style sheet proposal that was ultimately successful rejected the idea of new tags because a document
marked up with such tags would not have been valid under the HTML document type definition (DTD).
Is the formatting problem solved? I begged for style sheets in my August 1994 paper and now we have them, much
better thought-out and more powerful than I envisioned. The author/designer intent split is captured nicely. So what is