- From: Piotr Mitros via GitHub <sysbot+gh@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2024 15:46:45 +0000
- To: public-css-archive@w3.org
@chrisarmstrong In theory, yes. In practice, no, at least if you want even basic readability. HTML 2.0 browsers all had their own styling built-in for things like headers and paragraphs which were different, and designed to look okay on the devices of the day. HTML2 was entirely semantic, and a browser was free to render headers or paragraphs as most appropriate for the context, be that a text-only terminal (remember Lynx?), a graphic browser, Windows 3.1, an SGI workstation, or a screenreader. Although tables were part of HTML2, they really moved into their "prime" around the time of HTML 3 and 4, where they were widely used to define layout (rather than tabular data). Around the time, there was an expectation that browsers have pixel-perfect layout (which was the era of things like ACID tests). Those were the bad days, but from that point on, a browser could no longer render headings and text as it saw fit. The rendering was specified, and as specified, was designed to look fine on a 640x480 VGA monitor (or perhaps a higher-end SVGA monitor). Consequently, today, modern browsers don't render HTML 2.0 okay. On a 4k monitor, you will have lines in <p> text which run end-to-end on the screen, without reasonable margins. It's unreadable and unusable (at least until you click the little "toggle reader view" icon on Firefox, when it's rendered the way HTML 2.0 was meant to be rendered). Some minimal CSS is needed for a very baseline level of usability. I'm, of course, not suggesting a return to the HTML2 days. HTML5 was a major clean-up and takes a different philosophy. However, I'd like to see newer standards continue with that clean-up and general simplification to where newer standards continue to make things increasingly usable for normal users on a democratic, open web, like we used to have. -- GitHub Notification of comment by pmitros Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/10233#issuecomment-2075267366 using your GitHub account -- Sent via github-notify-ml as configured in https://github.com/w3c/github-notify-ml-config
Received on Wednesday, 24 April 2024 15:46:46 UTC