Re: Proposal for non-normative example section (Was: RE: How is it possible to devise such a feeble system?)

On Wednesday 24 October 2001 20:03, Jesse McCarthy wrote:
|   "Jeffrey Yasskin" <jyasskin@hotmail.com> wrote on 10/24/01 3:46:30 PM:
|   >Sorry. My statement was too broad. What I meant was that if the spec's
|   >meaning is up for discussion even on this list, novice developers can't
|   >possibly be expected to understand it or use it correctly.
|   >
|   >My proposal was a way to clarify the practical use of the spec. A useful
|   >side-effect will be that these kinds of omissions will be caught before
|   >the spec becomes a recommendation since the authors will have to
|   >actually use the spec before accepting it.
|   >
|   >Jeffrey Yasskin
|
|   Well I'm no expert, but it is my understanding that these specifications
| are published and made available for review by the web development
| community in general before becoming recommendations (?).  I hadn't even
| had a glimmer of becoming involved in website development in May of 1998
| when the CSS 2 specification became a W3 recommendation, let alone whatever
| review period may have led up to that, so I'm certainly not going to take
| the blame for this, but if what I understand the general situation to be is
| correct, where was the development community?  The fact that the ability to
| achieve what I described does not exist in CSS 2 is abusrd, and I can't
| imagine how, if this specification was subjected to public review,
| developers could have failed to notice this.

Ha-ha!.. 
"The fact that the ability to achieve what I described does not exist in CSS 
2 is abusrd"
Don't you think that the fact that one very well known Operating System, 
crashing very often and having numerous security issues, is widely accepted 
by computer users, is absurd as well?
And the same can be said about one very-well known Office Suite.
Well, it doesn't crash very often, just produces unexpected results. :-)
So, world is full of absurd, that's it. 
I dream it could be better, but it is not :-((

As about CSS - well, CSS development is not stopped (yet)
So, we *can* make additions to CSS specs, and force changes.
CSS3 has modular concept, which is Good.
Unfortunately, number of modules is too big, and some modules look like 
rather useless for me.
Besides, complexity of other modules makes me thinking that something is 
goind wrong...
In general, all this reminds me situation with Ada programming language, made 
by Consortium and which had 400+ pages in specification (CSS has even more!)
In contrast, Niklaus Wirth invented and implemented Modula-2, with 
specification of IIRC 37 pages only.
Than we had Ada 90 (or was it Ada 95?)
And, in contrast to this, Oberon was even more compact than Modula-2

Anyway, Ada, even with all its complexity, is superior to C and C++.
But all major vendors (suddenly) decided to code in C and C++.
Strange, isn't it?...

Well, may be, it's now good time to stop developing CSS in "Ada way", as 
otherwise we will face the fact that peole still continue to use C (TABLEs 
with transparent gifs)?
May be, we should have CSS core (just block layout/visual model, with 
decreased number of block *types*) and treat all other modules as 
*extensions* (*libraries*)? 
 
|
|   Another problem that I have with CSS 2 is that it does not allow you to
| create a block-level, non-replaced element, without an explicitly specified
| width, that is only just as large as the content it contains.  That would
| create an equally aggravating problem as the one we have been discussing if
| you wanted to horizontally center a block level element that did not have
| an explicit width set.  Perhaps it is legal to set width to 0 and
| white-space to nowrap, but the result of that seems to be undefined by the
| spec, at best.  One thing which might have helped to solve a lot of these
| problems would be have been a 'center' property for use with positioning
| (though I don't know what this would involve on an implementation level). 
| But if you had the two things I just mentioned, you could collapse the
| width of the block level element to the actual width of the content, then
| do something like { position: relative; center: 50%; }.

-- 

Vadim Plessky
http://kde2.newmail.ru  (English)
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Received on Wednesday, 24 October 2001 19:06:54 UTC