Re: Pandering to poor authorship (was Proposing <indent> vs. <blockquote>)

Dão Gottwald wrote:
> Mike Schinkel schrieb:
>>> The situation in which people can only insert snippets and not 
>>> affect their
>>> presentation can exist for very good reasons: to ensure that they don't
>>> create a mess. 
>> Again, specious. The case would be far more often than people would 
>> need to be given reasonable control of how their snippets would be 
>> formatted.  What site owner wants user contributions to be poorly 
>> visually formatted ?
> It is the page author who rules the layout. If she wants code blocks 
> to be indented, adding |pre { margin-left: 2em; }| to the stylesheet 
> is the trivial solution.
Once again you are mistakenly believing that all HTML authors author 
entire HTML pages.  That is far from reality, and increasingly less so 
each passing day.
>
>> That said, how can <indent> create a mess where <div 
>> style="padding-left:2em"> cannot?
>
> Who says that <div style="padding-left:2em"> cannot? Using <div> 
> instead of semantically descriptive elements should be considered 
> equally bad.
But you (or someone else) implied it was a better solution than 
<indent>.  I was pointing out for this reason it was not.

>
> Btw, that's also why the style attribute was deprecated in XHTML 1.1. 
I thought the reason we are working on HTML5 is because XHTML was a 
determined to not be such a good idea after all?

> HTML4 says "For optimal flexibility, authors should define styles in 
> external style sheets."
And that was written in the days before there were many situations where 
people contribute HTML to be stored in a database and then composed with 
HTML other people wrote, as in blogs, wikis, forums, etc.  Many HTML 
author simply do not have access to adding an external style sheet and 
we really should acknowledge and accommodate that reality.

-- 
-Mike Schinkel
http://www.mikeschinkel.com/blogs/
http://www.welldesignedurls.org
http://atlanta-web.org - http://t.oolicio.us

Received on Monday, 16 April 2007 08:42:55 UTC