Re: Pandering to poor authorship (was Proposing <indent> vs. <blockquote>)

Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
> It is *both* true that people in that situation can in fact achieve that
> presentation through <div style="padding-left:2em">[*], and that <indent>
> with a specced default presentation gives them no guarantee that there won't
> be some bit of CSS, out of their control, that says "indent {margin-left: 0}".
>   
That is a specious argument. Yes it is possible, but if it does occur 
then they can just use <indent style="padding-left:2em"> as per your 
<div> suggestion.
> The situation in which people can only insert snippets and not affect their
> presentation can exist for very good reasons: to ensure that they don't
> create a mess. 
Again, specious. The case would be far more often than people would need 
to be given reasonable control of how their snippets would be 
formatted.  What site owner wants user contributions to be poorly 
visually formatted ?

That said, how can <indent> create a mess where <div 
style="padding-left:2em"> cannot?
> And the other way around: when an environment is too limiting,
> the author (hopefully) has the freedom to use another environment instead.
>   
Huh?
> I don't see why or how the HTML spec would need to deal with these realities.
>
> [*] In fact, even <div style="padding-left:2em"> might simply be stripped
> down to <p> by the authoring environment. When you're not in control you're
> not in control.
>   
And in that case it would be much easier o allow <indent> than to have 
to parse <div style="padding-left:2em">.

What I'm hearing is that you have a "religious" objection to <indent> 
because I don't hear any practical objections.   So then should we do 
away with default formatted on <p>, <ol>, <ul>, etc. too?

-- 
-Mike Schinkel
http://www.mikeschinkel.com/blogs/
http://www.welldesignedurls.org
http://atlanta-web.org - http://t.oolicio.us

P.S. I'll repeat again just to be clear; I'm not advocating so much for 
specifically <indent> but instead against the mindset that we should 
avoid pragmatic solutions that make it easy to hand author common use 
cases without requiring the author to learn CSS on top of HTML.

Received on Monday, 16 April 2007 06:16:52 UTC