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

Mike Schinkel schrieb:
> 
> 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.

Replace "page author" by "site owner". It doesn't matter. The point is, 
you usually want pages to look frankensteinesque, no matter how many 
people participated.

>>> 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.

Well, what makes it better is that <div> and the style attribute are 
already sped'ed.

>> 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?

That was mainly related to XHTML2. XHTML1 isn't necessarily a bad thing; 
and I'm not sure if modularization (XHTML1.1) is considered harmful.

>> 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.

That's by design. Site owners could give others access to style sheets, 
but the reality is that they want people to contribute content, not layout.

--Dao

Received on Monday, 16 April 2007 09:20:33 UTC