Re: HTML Extensibility Through Script

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dean Edwards" <dean@edwards.name>
To: "Andrew Fedoniouk" <news@terrainformatica.com>
Cc: "Doug Schepers" <doug.schepers@vectoreal.com>; <public-html@w3.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 10, 2007 4:47 PM
Subject: Re: HTML Extensibility Through Script


> Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:
>> Cosider following style sheet:
>>
>> @media screen/webcore
>> {
>>   @include "something-for-webcore.js" as Things;
>>
>>   #mytext /* some fonts are hardly readable in webcore
>>       for Windows so they need to be tuned up */
>>   {
>>      font-family: Helvetica;
>>      font-size: 12pt;
>>      behaviour: Things.myText;
>>   }
>> }
>
>> I believe that CSS is a good place to do this so you will have 
>> centralized
>> visual (and behavioral) style definitions for different media types 
>> (different UAs are different medias too, e.g. some use subpixel glyph
>> rendering and others do not)
>>
>
> This seems very practical. However, I think that it would also encourage 
> "lazy" application of standards by browser vendors. It could lead to 
> dialects of CSS with the biggest vendors forcing CSS away from W3C 
> standards. A feature like this could be a can of worms...
>

"encourage "lazy" in application of standards"

Dean, I honestly think that you expressed the very last motivation subject
in the list.

And about "It could lead to dialects of CSS...".
There are dialects already. And they will always be. By nature
of software development.  Say UA specific attributes (starting with
'-') are already allowed in CSS. They give opportunity to test
features on wide auditorium so they support evolution of the technology.

Want we here or we do not want it but Web heavily
uses UA specific solutions already through various tricks and
hacks, see: http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=CssHack as
an example. Using things like this in the wild
prevents bugs to be fixed in UAs. At least.
Absence of versioning impedes evolution of web technologies,
IMO.

Take a look on C++ compilers. C++ specification is
significantly more deterministic and formal than, say, CSS spec.
But there is no C++ compiler that is 100% compatible
with the standard. But in C++ world we do have such thing as
#if defined( compiler_id_1 )
#elif defined( compiler_id_2 )
....
Such conditional compilation only helps compiler vendors to
evolve their products.

Andrew Fedoniouk.
http://terrainformatica.com

Received on Wednesday, 11 July 2007 06:00:41 UTC