Re: Minimal Browser Capabilities

On Thursday 27 December 2001 01:15, Tina Marie Holmboe wrote:
[...]
|
|     I believe - again, knowing the dangers - that we also agree that for
|     the foreseeable future it is HTML and XHTML which will be the main
|     packaging for content at the moment it is delivered to a user-agent.
|
|     Anything above this basic level - be it CSS, Javascript, Ecmascript
|     Flash or SVG - would be best considered as content enhancement
|     techniques.[2]

Tina, 
I don't know wether you are familiar with browser's design internals.
I will try to enlight some details.
Every major browser uses CSS (for layout work), you just can't take some 
browser and *switch CSS off*.
Please look at attached stylesheet, which is default one for Konqueror.
I think it can be treated as some kind of reference design for HTML4 - "HTML4 
implemented in CSS". In fact, I look at this from time to time when I want to 
understand some CSS constructions or their treatment by different browsers 
better.
If you have some page in HTML4, you can take all elements form it, define 
them in XML, and than ... take CSS definitions from attached file.
And guess what? You will achieve with XML+CSS exactly same layout as with 
initial HTML4, but code will be more clean (presentation will be separated 
from content)
Therefor CSS can't be considered as a content enhancement technique.
It's natural part of browser design, and you can't get rid of it. 

As about Flash or SVG  - yes, they are some kind of content enhancement.
As some one else said, SVG's future depends now on Microsoft.
If MS adopts SVG and bundles some (even broken or incomplete) plugin with MS 
IE - than SVG can attract web developers. Otherwise I doubt SVG will get 
acceptance.

|
|     With this in mind, I would suggest that a 'minimum requirement' would
|     be for a user agent to know how to handle HTML [3] and know how to
|     survive [4] XHTML.
|
|     The bottom line: a 'minimum requirements' browser shouldn't break
|     content.
|
Content is usually broken by Web Developer, not by Browser! :-)

-- 

Vadim Plessky
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