- From: Ben Godfrey <afternoon@uk2.net>
- Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 10:25:05 +0100
- To: www-style@w3.org
> What I was saying is that, if someone has something to say HTML has > the tools to allow them to do it quite well. True. > If they also want to make that something sound good when mechanically > spoken or look good and, at the same time, be easily readable, when > viewed visually, learning a styling language is one of the least > things they need to learn. This is a good point and the web is always going to suffer from people using red text on a bright pink background. However, once you get through basic things like not making people sick when they view your page you start to get into the subtler and much more important issues of designing pages. Pages that can be touted around web without malfunctioning so badly that somebody finds them completely useless or the layout breaks enough to look shonky and reflect badly on the creator. It is then that the designer needs help from CSS. Currently creating fluid layouts in CSS is laborious. With tables the first part, defining the grid, was easy, even if the details soon got far too complicated. With CSS it's complicated off the bat. It's powerful, I don't doubt that, in fact I think it's too powerful. It gives the user about a mile of rope to hang themselves with. What we need, IMHO, is syntax that reflects the way beginners and non-technical designers talk about a page. Things like "navigation on the left". They key is the relationship, not the co-ordinates. We talked about constraint-based CSS, which looked like an interesting proposal and allowed for users to specify relationships easily, but it was also rather involved and would not have complimented the current structure of CSS very well. Personally I think the key is grids. Ask any designer and they'll tell you how important grids are to the layout process. A new set of display modes, grid, grid-cell, etc, that build on the way tables work but remove the complexity that arises because tables are for data and allow more layout control would be my suggestion. I know grids are crap when you come to view the page in a very small or very large window, but that is something that media queries could address. Either that or a system of controlled degradation could be built into the logic for rendering grid items. Ben (q) Ben Godfrey? (a) Web Developer and Designer See http://aftnn.org/ for details
Received on Tuesday, 17 June 2003 05:25:13 UTC