- From: Mike Schinkel <w3c-lists@mikeschinkel.com>
- Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 03:23:32 -0400
- To: public-html@w3.org
Sander Tekelenburg wrote: > My previous sentence was too unclear. Sorry. What I meant to convey was that > for your use case <indent> offers no more than <div > style="padding-left:2em"> does. I agree it offers no more visually, but it offers a lot more in terms of 1.) less learning required (HTML only and not CSS), 2.) less typing, and 3.) less liklihood of mistyping. > Whoever is in control of the site is in > control. If they don't want to allow style attributes, they'll just strip > them. That's idealistic. Many people run software build by other people that makes the decisions for them (i.e. WordPress, vBulletin, etc.) > Adding <indent> to the spec will just make the same admin replace > <indent> with <div>. Huh? >>> 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. No disagreement, but your argument is tangential. It is your attempt to tie the need for website publishers to control submitted content to the validity of an <indent> element, and they are not related. IOW, if <indent> does or does not exist it doesn't change website publishers need to control submitted content. Can we please stay on topic? >> 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. Which is draconian and is used simply because it is easier not because it is better. But that said, let's get back on topic. > 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. That's why it is so important to have simple and generic elements like <indent> instead of encouraging people to put explicit styling in. You are making my point. > And when the site admin *does* want to allow users to 'go nuts', he can > simply allow style attributes. Currently either he has to allow style elements or he cannot give users a complete set of reasonable control w/o essentially endorsing misused semantics (i.e. <blockquote>) >> 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. But <indent> is much easier to parse and thus will be more likely controlled effectively. >>> 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. Funny, you continue to make my point for me... >>> [*] 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? I don't; you need to parse something to know what to keep as much as to know what to strip. >> What I'm hearing is that you have a "religious" objection to <indent> > > I'm anti-religious. Maybe with questions about god, but not it seems with questions about markup. :-) >> [...] So then should we do >> away with default formatted on <p>, <ol>, <ul>, etc. too? > > I've been arguing against some people's wishes to aim for sites to look the > same in every browsing environment by speccing default presentations, yes. That is apples and oranges. I'm not asking for them to look the same in every browsing environment, I'm asking that there be an element that for a given browsing environment the element can have a default presentation and not any associated semantics. Dão Gottwald wrote: > 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. > As I just said to Sander, that issue is not relevant to this debate. >>>> 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. See the three benefits I stated at the beginning of this email in reply to Sander. >>> 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. I disagree, I think XHTML 1.0 is a bad thing and I think that's why TBL recognized recently. My discussions with Ian et. al. on the WHATWG where what brought me to this conclusion. >>> 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. That is painful idealistic. You are assuming site owners are fully congizant of all these issues and that they can cause implementation changes merely by thinking about them. I'll content that, with the explosion of use of open-source content management systems (WordPress, Drupal, etc. etc.) that most sites on the web are developed by someone other than the site owner; if not, they soon will be. And I think it is critical that the HTMLWG acknowledge this reality. -- -Mike Schinkel http://www.mikeschinkel.com/blogs/ http://www.welldesignedurls.org http://atlanta-web.org - http://t.oolicio.us
Received on Saturday, 28 April 2007 07:23:53 UTC