Re: CSS aims

On 1/14/14, 11:29 AM, "Brian Kardell" <bkardell@gmail.com> wrote:

>I've been thinking a lot lately because of some related threads on other
>lists:  Is it plausible to imagine a clean/reasonably complete decoupling
>of presentation from structure without adding dubious amounts of
>complexity?  I'm asking it here because i
> think it plays in some ways to think about the direction of the platform
>present and future to look at where to aim efforts at explanation and
>extensibility.
>I guess my question is:  intentionally pretty vague because I'm
>interested in hearing where you all think various answers and pieces
>being pondered fit together in this general aim.

I have been thinking quite a lot on this topic. The way you’re posing the
question, I think the answer is no. There is no reasonably complete way to
decouple presentation from structure, because presentation often requires
structure. Items are grouped or wrapped for purely presentational
purposes. A layout has a structure that is separate from its content.

I think your question is different than, “Is there a way to encode all
presentation in CSS?” I think that *might* be possible, but it would
require adding structure to CSS. I’ve looked in to doing just that, and my
opinion at the moment is that adding structure to CSS is (a) really
difficult and (b) hard to justify when HTML is really good at structure.

So I’m inclined towards approaches that find ways of decoupling the
content structure from the presentational structure in HTML.

Thanks,

Alan

Received on Tuesday, 14 January 2014 19:46:20 UTC