- From: Sander Tekelenburg <st@isoc.nl>
- Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 20:02:34 +0200
- To: <public-html@w3.org>
At 02:16 -0400 UTC, on 2007-04-16, Mike Schinkel wrote: > Sander Tekelenburg wrote: >> It is *both* true that people in that situation can in fact achieve that >> presentation through <div style="padding-left:2em">[*], and that <indent> >> with a specced default presentation gives them no guarantee that there won't >> be some bit of CSS, out of their control, that says "indent {margin-left: >>0}". >> > That is a specious argument. Yes it is possible, but if it does occur > then they can just use <indent style="padding-left:2em"> as per your > <div> suggestion. My previous sentence was too unclear. Sorry. What I meant to convey was that for yopur use case <indent> offers no more than <div style="padding-left:2em"> does. Whoever is in control of the site is in control. If they don't want to allow style attributes, they'll just strip them. Adding <indent> to the spec will just make the same admin replace <indent> with <div>. >> 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. I have no numbers (do you?), but I can assure you that many site admins need to ensure that content editors cannot affect presentation. This is no different from companies/organisations requiring their content providers to use consistent styling in printed material that goes out. > What site owner wants user contributions to be poorly > visually formatted ? Exactly. Usually the only way to achieve that is to remove as many possibilities from content providers as possible. If you don't, your content editors will go nuts -- every paragraph will be in a different font with different margins, etc. Or at the very least, your content editors will each be suggesting different presentations, making the site look a mess to visitors. And when the site admin *does* want to allow users to 'go nuts', he can simply allow style attributes. > That said, how can <indent> create a mess where <div > style="padding-left:2em"> cannot? I meant to make clear that for your use case there is no difference. <indent> or <div style=blah> will be under the control of whoever is in control. >> And the other way around: when an environment is too limiting, >> the author (hopefully) has the freedom to use another environment instead. >> > Huh? If system or service x doesn't allow you to publish your content the way you want, you switch to a system or service that does. [...] >> [*] In fact, even <div style="padding-left:2em"> might simply be stripped >> down to <p> by the authoring environment. When you're not in control you're >> not in control. >> > And in that case it would be much easier o allow <indent> than to have > to parse <div style="padding-left:2em">. What makes you think <indent> wouldn't be stripped, or replaced? > What I'm hearing is that you have a "religious" objection to <indent> I'm anti-religious. > [...] So then should we do > away with default formatted on <p>, <ol>, <ul>, etc. too? I've been argueing against some people's wishes to aim for sites to look the same in every browsing environment by speccing default presentations, yes. -- Sander Tekelenburg The Web Repair Initiative: <http://webrepair.org/>
Received on Monday, 16 April 2007 18:11:37 UTC