Re: Positioning HTML Elements with Cascading Style Sheets

On Sat, 1 Feb 1997, Todd Fahrner wrote:

> I may be wasting my time, what with Netscape's J-ESS (or JASS or JSSS or
> whatever) and Microsoft's Trident headed for public beta. The former of
> these technologies especially demonstrates that if you're comfortable with
> Javascript, you can bypass CSS altogether. I fear that the programmers who
> are bringing us script-based solutions to style (J*SS, CSSOM, even DSSSL)
> have been conditioned by their education to deprecate the declarative,
> procedural nature of CSS in favor of Turing-complete approaches. Yet if the
> popularity of <I> over <EM> is any indication, authors are *more
> comfortable* with declarative, procedural systems than more abstract ones,
> however powerful.

I've always felt that you can either have a really good programming language,
or a really good WYSIWYG editor for something.  And if can't have either,
something about the design is bad.  If you have both, you've found the
Holy Grail.

I like programming languages.  They're powerful.   If they're well designed,
you can do anything with them.

But I can understand where declarative formats are also good.

One of the concerns I had with MNG at one point (and probably still have)
is that the looping etc capabilities were getting some complex that I can't
imagaine writing a WYSIWYG editor for it.  But if I implement it as a scipting
language, it isn't a particularily good one.

Is it possible to create a WYSIWYG editor for using other values as a simple
function?  I don't know.

I think as the web has gotten more complex, it's gotten harder to write a good
WYSIWYG editor.  I'm not sure if it's possible to write a really good HTML
editor.




nemo
                                                 http://www.cyclic.com/~nemo
<nemo@koa.iolani.honolulu.hi.us>                    <devnull@gnu.ai.mit.edu>
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"...For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners." -- Matthew 9:13

Received on Sunday, 2 February 1997 01:11:36 UTC