In
computer science, particularly in
human-computer interaction, presentation semantics specify how a particular piece of a
formal language is represented in a distinguished manner accessible to
human senses
A sense is a biological system used by an organism for sensation, the process of gathering information about the world through the detection of stimuli. (For example, in the human body, the brain which is part of the central nervous system rec ...
, usually human vision. For example, saying that
... must render the text between these constructs using some
bold typeface is a specification of presentation semantics for that
syntax
In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency) ...
.
Many
markup languages, including
HTML,
DSSSL, and
XSL-FO
XSL-FO (XSL Formatting Objects) is a markup language for XML document formatting that is most often used to generate PDF files. XSL-FO is part of XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language), a set of W3C technologies designed for the transformation and ...
, have presentation semantics, but others, such as
XML, do not.
Character encoding standards, such as
Unicode, also have presentation semantics.
One of the main goals of
style sheet languages is to separate the syntax that defines document content from the syntax endowed with presentation semantics. This is the norm on the
World Wide Web, where the
Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...
language provides a large collection of presentation semantics for HTML documents.
References
{{compu-sci-stub
Semantics
Human–computer interaction
Programming language topics