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

> 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

Which is the domain of XSL.  CSS is intended to be a relatively simple
styling language, and easy to learn, although is now suffering the bloat
that is the fate of all computer standards (which start focussed then
try to do everything).

The fact that XSL is not widely implemented indicates that browser marketing
people don't consider there to be a real demand, although, to some extent,
that is the result of an unsophisticated market that is failing to understand
that different tools are appropriate for different jobs (e.g. I think that
tagged PDF is the best compromise for pixel perfection with accessibility,
but most authors try and achieve pixel perfection with HTML/CSS, forgetting
the accessibility).

To take a point from another article, if you want a feature in CSS3 that
is only going to be widely deployed in 5 to 10 years, an inability to
support XSL in HTML should not be an issue, especially as XHTML 1.0 provides
a mechanism for writing, de facto, backward compatible XML.

> 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.

Received on Thursday, 7 April 2005 06:50:09 UTC