- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2009 07:45:50 +0000 (UTC)
- To: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Cc: HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
On Mon, 8 Jun 2009, Henri Sivonen wrote: > On Jun 6, 2009, at 00:45, Ian Hickson wrote: > > On Fri, 1 May 2009, Henri Sivonen wrote: > > > > > > So if I want to have a relatively simple GUI table editor that can > > > read back what it has written but doesn't allow arbitrary styling to > > > avoid breaking the consistent design of the site, I have to not only > > > parse style='' values but parse arbitrary CSS and resolve class > > > selectors? > > > > > > My concern isn't authoring in a text editor. > > > > In a graphical editor all you would have to do is use unique class > > names (like com.example.numeric) and just ensure that those classes > > have the appropriate style in the style sheet. > > Seriously? When there's already widely interoperable specific attributes > for this? You are wildly oversimplifying "this". In practice a WYSIWYG tool isn't going to style a table in 90% CSS and then gain great benefits by specifying just the vertical and horizontal alignment using attributes, _especially_ considering that those attributes don't even provide the actual desired control (decimal alignment). Styling a table involves complicated rules for getting the borders right, involves non-trivial padding even after getting the alignment right, can involve per-cell colouring, etc. At the end of the day, using the align="" and valign="" attributes to control alignment on cells is a false economy. This is made significantly worse by the cost of including these attributes in the language, which is a serious hit to the credibility of argument that authors should separate their styles and semantics for improved accessibility, maintainability, and device-independence. I firmly believe that a big part of why HTML4 failed to wean people from Transitional is that it (even in Strict mode) gave credence to the idea that presenational markup was ok. You mention a number of mottos in your last e-mail, but it's worth considering that most of them apply equally to arguments for align="" on <td>, for marginheight="" or margintop="" on <body>, for align="" on <p>, or for <center>, or for any number of other presentational features. For HTML5 I have taken, for the reasons described above, a pretty hard line on the "Media Independence" motto. For media-independent content like tabular data, we should keep HTML5 neutral on media-specific issues, only allowing media-dependence for media-specific features like <audio>, <img>, or <canvas>. This underlies the attempts to e.g. define <b> in a media-neutral manner, and the attempts to remove presentational markup that can't be justified in such a manner. (I have considered how we could turn "align" into a hint regarding numeric vs text or some such, but I haven't found a way to do it that could work.) -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Monday, 8 June 2009 07:46:27 UTC