RE: Parent pseudo-containers - a method for seperation of content from design

I think Emrah's post speaks to a fundamental problem I'm beginning to see.
There are really three distinct concepts that need to be separated, not two:
Content, Layout, and Style.

CSS crosses the boundary between Layout and Style and because it doesn't
directly address Layout it does a very mediocre job.  The example of needing
to move a visual element from the bottom to the top is just one of many.

The clue for me is whenever it's necessary to change the underlying
XML/XHTML/HTML to yield the required rendering, and that change cannot be
justified by the content alone.  This is just as bad a conceptual breakdown
as using tables for layout instead of tabular data, but is more difficult to
recognize.  And, so it's easy to overlook.




> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-style-request@w3.org [mailto:www-style-request@w3.org] On Behalf
> Of Emrah BASKAYA
> Sent: Wednesday, April 06, 2005 3:00 PM
> To: www-style@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Parent pseudo-containers - a method for seperation of content
> from design
> 
> 
> 
> >> Many times, to design layouts, we depend on nested divs. The nesting is
> >> not necessarily semantic, and is just to serve the layout. So this is
> >
> > It seems to me that you are straying out of the scope of CSS into the
> > the scope of XSL.
> >
> 
> Thanks for noticing to say the least.
> 
> I think the scope of CSS should be total seperation of content from
> design. It is good to know I can change the blue background to green
> anytime I want using CSS for the whole site, but when I want my navigation
> bar displayed on the very top instead of the bottom in my liquid design
> (just an example, I am not that imaginative), CSS gives me no way to do
> this.
> 
> We'll have relatively complex feature such as move-to which asks the
> content to be placed later in the document, but I deem it only as a
> half-hearted attempt of seperation of content from style, and same goes
> for ::outside. If the browser can be asked with move-to to rearrange the
> flow in CSS3 with a very bad limitation, why not create a method for a
> total re-arranging with no limitations with a much simpler syntax that I
> outlined, that will help authors convert their old and fixed designs into
> liquid ones, and whatnot?
> 
> To illustrate what I proposed for the ones who hadn't took their time to
> read my long proposal:
> With the method I describe, we could turn this:
> +-----------+
> |A          |
> +-----------+
> |B          |
> |           |
> +-----------+
> |C      | D |
> +-----------+
> 
> into this:
> +-----------+
> |A      | D |
> +-----------+
> |B          |
> |           |
> +-----------+
> |C          |
> +-----------+
> 
> Simply with CSS, and what's more, we would be able to apply this to *old
> css2 styled pages with excess styling markup*.
> 
> We could also turn this:
> 
> +----------------------------------+
> |more important for visual browsers|
> +----------------------------------+
> |some content                      |
> +----------------------------------+
> |some more content                 |
> +----------------------------------+
> |more important for aural browsers |
> +----------------------------------+
> 
> Into
> 
> +----------------------------------+
> |more important for aural browsers |
> +----------------------------------+
> |some content                      |
> +----------------------------------+
> |some more content                 |
> +----------------------------------+
> |more important for visual browsers|
> +----------------------------------+
> 
> only with CSS.
> 
> I urge anyone who haven't read the full description at:
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2005Apr/0058.html
> 
> 
> --
> Emrah BASKAYA
> www.hesido.com

Received on Wednesday, 6 April 2005 22:19:41 UTC