Re: XBL in CSS

Ian Hickson wrote:

> Would the CSS community and working group object to the XBL2 specification 
> including the following two CSS features?
> 
> First, a 'binding' property, defined to take a list of one or more <url>s 
> or the keyword 'none', which would act as a binding mechanism to specify 
> one or more XBL bindings to apply to an element.
> 
> Second, a pseudo-class ':xbl-bound-element' that matches an XBL bound 
> element.

We started discussing such additions to CSS in 1997 in a document 
(BECSS) authored by Netscape, Microsoft and Electricité de France...
In the meantime, Mozilla and XBL have easily proven the total inocuity
of a 'binding' property added to the knowledge of the local CSS parser,
and the feasability of an XBL engine added aside to a CSS style engone.

After all these years, CSS is nowadays the undisputed stylesheet
language on the web because it's at the same time extremely simple to
learn and powerful enough to meet the exacting needs of web designers.

Ah, yes, of course, a 'binding' is not stylistic... Why should that new
property live under the text/css mimetype ?!? That old argument
again that people being more royalist than the Queen Elizabeth herself
always use.
First, conceptual purity has been a blocker in this behavioural world
for nine years and has not been able to even reach the beginning of a
plausible solution for bindings on the web ; on the contrary, adding
the 'binding' property is doable immediately and offers simplicity
and backwards-compatibility at a very cheap price.
Second, MIME types are... well... let's say counter-productive. In the
name of MIME purity, and I have been working on MIME since the early
days of Borenstein's proposal, aggregation and extensibility of
interpreted data has often been trampled underfoot, in total
contradiction with user's needs and expectations.

So as soon as conformance to the CSS spec does not imply mandatory
implementation or even parsing of this property and that
pseudo, and it doesn't, I urge everyone to accept the proposed solution.
It's HIGHLY time to move on, and the last nine years were not enough
for the smartest W3C members to bring a better and simpler solution on
the table.

Here's my word: let's try it.

</Daniel>

Received on Monday, 14 August 2006 08:59:19 UTC