Re: CSS Regions considered harmful

On 23/01/2014 00:20, Håkon Wium Lie wrote:

>   > >You don't read enough magazines.  Flowing text from one shape to
>   > >another is another other major use-case.
>
> I see them. That doens't automatically make them really good use
> cases. Also by adding ways to select and style individual columns,
> these designs can be achieved.

I don't what how you can measure if a use case is a "good
use case" or not when it comes from the real world of printed
material. It exists, represents users' request. We're not asked
to judge it, we're asked to deal with it.

Anyway. You two are not discussing the same thing here. One
says "shape" and the other says "column". These are different
beasts, with a non-null intersection, but still. They don't serve
the same purpose and are different. Alan and I, during our
printed material research on both regions and shapes, found
existing layouts in the press or books that would be hacky if
expressed in terms of columns. This was said multiple times in
the past IIRC.

Now speaking of "harm", I think I will stick to Eric Meyer's
interpretation of it [1]. For me, trying to put 25 years of DTP
habits into columns _only_ instead of trying to match what that
industry has been successfully delivering for decades is also A
Bad Thing. And I am quite sure the DTP industry and the
users of DTP software feel the same...

About "the separation of style from structure", my own feeling is
that this 25 years old idealistic view of our tech world is not
valid any more, we have binding properties attaching a shadow DOM
to an element through CSS and nobody screams at it. We have
structural attributes that trigger styles in vectorial graphics
and nobody screams at it. We have stuff in CSS to base stylistic
rules on attributes and even content and nobody screams at it. We start
seeing proposals to reorder structure from CSS-like rules, à la STTS,
and nobody asks "if" such rules will be merged some day with CSS but
only "when".

I'm not saying that "the separation of style from structure" is
not ideal. It is. I'm saying reality is - and has always been -
more complex than that.


[1] http://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html

</Daniel>

Received on Thursday, 23 January 2014 08:54:40 UTC