Re: Float overflowing behavior!

On Friday 16 August 2002 10:00 pm, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
|  > 1) writing a Web page using only <span>s and <div>s
|  > what's wrong with that?
|
|  Nothing, until someone can't load your CSS. Then your document becomes
|  nearly devoid of meaning, structure, and comprehensibility.

I doubt you should target *any* page which you design nowdays to browsers not 
supporting CSS.
MS IE has 95% of the market (sigh..), Mozilla another 1%, Konqueror about 1%, 
and Opera 1% to 2%.  And all those browsers support CSS (at least CSS1, div's 
and span's)

|
|  > 4) saying width:100% when you mean width:auto
|  > How do you *know* what people *mean*? Do you have CrystalBall?
|
|  I have yet to see a "CSS layout" in which someone _wanted_ a "width:
|  100%" anything; usually the present of paddings and borders makes such
|  constructs overflow their parents and look ugly (except in IE/Windows).

I think I have several testcases with width: 100%.
I think it was testcase for <hr> (several ways to define it)

|
|  > Using 'width:auto' when you need div taking all width, is stupid, STUPID
|  > approach!
|
|  Would you care to clarify this point of view?  Why is this stupid?

If someone familiar with ,mathematics (or in particular, with geometry) - he 
thinks of something as XX percent of another thing (xx/100 fraction) or A/B 
fraction.
And you can understand width: 100% *without* redaing W3C CSS specs.
What "auto" means is really unclear. Both for mathemation and for ordinar 
user.
 Oh, yes I realize that people on www-style list should be aware of W3C CSS 
specs. 
But I doubt typical web master will take his (her) time to read *all* W3C 
specs...  On th eother hand, he (she) will understand what width: 100% means.

|
|  > If W3C designed bad specification, or offers bad validation tools-
|  > that's the problem of W3C, not of web authors!
|
|  The W3C offers syntax validation tools.  It does not offer symantic
|  validation tools.  This is precisely the difference between
|  spell-checking/grammar-checking your document and having a trained
|  editor give it a thorough working-over.
|
|  Your complaint about validation tools is akin to someone complaining
|  that their C compiler will not let them add together two strings but
|  will happily let them write code that results in a runtime
|  divide-by-zero....  Granted, it would be nice to have something that
|  catches the logic (as opposed to syntax) error, but that is not the job
|  of the _compiler_.

No, I was speaking about syntax (not about semantics!)

BTW:  C is very ugly language.
Just compare it to Modula-2 or Oberon, to understand what I mean here :-)
 
|
|  What you're really looking for here is not a validator, but a
|  "lint"-like program for CSS (and weblint _did_ use to exist for HTML at
|  some point; not sure what the state of it is now).
|
|  Boris

-- 

Vadim Plessky
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Received on Monday, 19 August 2002 08:54:46 UTC