rjohara - 2:02 am on Aug 22, 2005 (gmt 0)

It looks like HTML was created for academic, military type documents. What web page resembles an h1, p p p p h2, p p p p list h3 p p p p p blockquote p p p p h3.?

Well, most of mine do. ;-)

Yes of course, HTML was invented as a way of marking up standard academic publications so they could be displayed on the Internet. What Berners-Lee did was specify a group of structural elements that you commonly find in academic papers, and he then created a stripped-down version of SGML (invented years before to handle the computerization of huge government documents, like airplane maintenance manuals) that most anyone could use. These basic elements are what have always been and still are used in most every academic journal. Over the years some of the inconsistencies (or constraints) in Berners-Lee's original element-set have come back to haunt us. There never should have been empty elements like <br> for example; the conceptually correct element would have been <line>, which may appear in some future version; but we all labor under the burden of history.

Anyone interested in getting a better handle on the foundations of HTML might want to spend some time studying the default stylesheet underlying most browsers [w3.org]. Every browser has its own stylesheet built in -- it's what you get when you don't apply any CSS at all to an HTML document. These default styles are largely inherited from the original Mosaic-generation browsers and give you a feeling for how HTML was originally conceived.