Re: target and frames nonsense (Was: Re: Comments on HLink)

Hi gang. Uncle Wingnut, king of the lurkers here.  First off, I 
apologize to those who want rigid comments here, because this ain't 
gonna be one.

Second off, I want to tell you that, in my opinion, everytime Bill 
Hammond opens his mouth, this whole list becomes much more intelligent. 
  Thanks Bill.  And, he's right, in my book.  We/you have taken this 
separation of content and presentation to the extreme, and its about to 
bite us all in the butt.  A documment SHOULD/COULD have some primordial 
presentationism on its own.  DIV?  C'mon.  Its a friggin' BOX!!  Did we 
call it "the div model".  No, its a box model.  Kneejsrk reaction will 
send you to thinking that box models and block areas are different, but 
are they so much different?

<box id="mybox"> If a palmtop or a browser-in-a-coffeemaker can't put up 
a border around some text, or render-up a primitive HR or BR... it is 
incompetent, and thats that.</box>

If I'm authoring a web doc, with an external stylesheet, I often 
write/derive the CONTENT first, and later, I write the styles. In the 
act of writing the content, I want some barebones markup rendering, and 
that means boxes (div and whatever other block-crap one invents), lines 
(HR's. VR's) and whitespacers (BR's, and maybe P's or INDENT).  With 
those, I can get a good idea of what the STYLED markup will look like, 
even though I haven't written the stylerules yet. At least I can 
render-up the content enough to see where I've made typing mistakes or 
where my MOO has mis-marked-up.

Have we ever talked about webpages having a author-controlled "don't 
even think about using your palmtop stylesheet on my pretty Mozilla 
content" flag and setting?  Probably a different subject. But what if 
the author WANTS to say... "If you can't render my styles, don't attempt 
your own... stick with the content-only markup" (which the author knows 
is tolerable)?  I believe WEB content, must have a small degree of its 
own markup structure.  Get out Ted's transclusion stuff if you want to 
hand around chunks of pure, raw content.  Web content, must have some 
primitive styling.

Thanks Bill... your horse sense comes through again.

Larry "Wingnut" Wendlandt
Mad Scientist



William F Hammond wrote:
> "Steven Pemberton" <Steven.Pemberton@cwi.nl> writes:
> 
> 
>>>target is effectively deprecated.
>>
>>Actually not. Now with XFrames being a separate spec, and the
>>strict/loose/frameset trichotomy disappearing, target will be in XHTML 2.
> 
> 
> <grumble class="curmudgeon">
> I've always seen target, frames, and friends (going back to blink) as
> juvenile.
> </grumble>
> 
> Aren't XHTML elements and their attributes (possibly apart from the
> "class" attribute that characterizes different presentation modes
> abstractly) supposed to reflect _content_ rather than _presentation_ ?
> 
> <grumble class="parenthetical">
> And you guys want to trash <br> and <hr> which do, in fact, represent
> loosely structured content.
> </grumble>
> 
> IMHO if XHTML is to be taken seriously by content providers, then the
> opening of new windows should happen in user agents only upon the
> user's employment of an alternate form of link selection (such as
> "shift-click").
> 
> New window surprises annoy users.  A content provider whose sponsor
> thinks they are cool, has for a client a dotcom that is losing
> customers.
> 
> At the cocktail parties I attend, when ordinary people find out that I
> know something about HTML, I tend to be bombarded with questions about
> how to turn off various forms of unwanted new windows.  It's something
> like a tax that I have to pay these days.
> 
>                                     -- Bill
> 
> P.S.  Rolling out new and better names is a good thing.  Deprecating
> names from old W3C recommendations absent a compelling reason is not
> unless the goal is to ensure the longevity of HTML 4.  Gratuitous
> backward compatibility problems always soil reputations.
>

Received on Saturday, 28 September 2002 12:42:32 UTC