Re: Center DIV

> situation arose. At what point did CSS become so complicated that it 
> requires the originators to explain themselves so laboriously and, more 
> relevantly, is this situation consistent with the goals of the W3C? The 

Once you try to write up a complete and self consistent description.
Typical vendor documentation leaves a lot of the behaviour of an interface
unspecified, without stating that it is unspecified.  Part of a standards
bodies job is to make the behaviour very precise or make implementation
choices explicit.

That has the effect of producing legalistic documents and also forces
one to realise that things that might, at first sight, look attractive,
lead to contradictions.  However, those documents are really valuable for
the technician as they avoid the need to try out on every platform and
the fear that an implementation choice may change in the next version
because the vendor never realised that people where relying on it.

I have, for example, found that the X/open Unix man pages are much
more useful than the SCO man pages because they do describe the boundary
conditions properly.

Received on Friday, 4 July 2003 02:52:23 UTC