HTML: The New Punctuation

Lynne Truss wrote an amazing book. Eats, Shoots and Leaves does not just inspire gramatical sticklers to be proud of their neuroticisms. She describes each of the marks and their history as well as laments their misue. Not only does she describe their utility to the English language, but also makes a case that without them, our words would lose their meaning.

A fascinating part of her book is her section on commas, which explains how many of these marks evolved. Ancient languages like Hebrew and Latin contained no case or punctuation at all, at times there were not even spaces between words. Imagine the dogmatic problem with:

AMENISAYTOYOUONTHISDAYYOUSHALLBEWITHMEINHEAVEN

Which can be translated into the protestant version:

Amen I say to you, on this day you shall be with me in heaven.

Or, in the Catholic version (which allows for the existence purgatory):

Amen I say to you on this day, you shall be with me in heaven.

All that changed with Aldus Manutius the Elder and Younger, who insisted that marks for text should denote syntax and not simply verbal pace. Since the Manutii of the sixteenth century, there has been a struggle between punctuation denoting syntax or reading speed. Cecily Hartley in 1818 stated that when reading, the comma denoted a one-count pause, the semi-colon a two-, colon a three-, and period a four.

Booooooooring

Why this diatribe on grammar? Web designers today are facing similar problems. The following two snippets of code will produce similar results:

<p>This is a paragraph.</p>
<p>This is another paragraph.</p>

This is a paragraph.

This is another paragraph.

<p>This is a paragraph.<br />
<br />This is another paragraph.</p>

This is a paragraph.

This is another paragraph.

Which is better? I would argue the first example, as tells the web browser syntactically what it is trying to display. As a better example;

<p>I <i>really</i> liked Truss' <i>Eats, Shoots and Leaves</i>.</p>

I really liked Truss' Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

<p>I <em>really</em> liked Truss' <cite>Eats, Shoots and Leaves</cite>.</p>

I really liked Truss' Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

This seems fairly striaghtforward and similar. However, what if the author wants all of the text on his page to be italicized? In the first example he is stuck with

I really liked Truss' Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

Meanwhile, a careful coder could delineate his stylesheet to react in the following way:

I really liked Truss' Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

So, what?

Today is an exciting time for digital publishing. While Tim Berners-Lee may have been the digital Homer, the new Manutius is right around the corner. Today is the puberty of the web, and those in the trenches—the web designers—will determine the future. Perhaps in the next few years a completely new method of describing text will emerge.

In the end, when Zeldman and co. advocate web standards, while pulling out their hair over content management systems that encourage presentational mark-up like we're so used to in Microsoft Word, they're just being sticklers. Style and tags in

Work Cited

Truss, Lynne. Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.New York: Gotham, 2003.