Re: CSS aims

On 1/23/14 12:57 PM, Brian Kardell wrote:
>     It depends on what you are meaning by structure, what you mean by
>     presentation, and what you mean by… meaning. :)
>
> Given where we are in Web history, doesn't it feel like there should be
> a fairly simple canonical definition we can point to to answer that
> question?  Where is it?  Does it exist?

No, it doesn't exist.  These - meaning in particular - are human terms.

> If you were creating an interface that includes, say, a list of folks I
> know who are online, you might just have a list (<ul> or <li>).  Simple
> enough.
>
> Now let's say you want to add an icon to the left of that - is that
> style or structure?  With CSS, if you had data in an attribute or
> something you could use ::before to pick an attribute value and display
> a particular 'kind' of image (online/offline).   Still, seems reasonably
> simple and fairly clear cut.
>
> But -- what if I decide I might want to interact with it somehow?  Does
> that change its nature?  Now I need it to be a real element and -- seems
> legit.

Does there have to be a single answer to this?  I've been lurking on 
this list for a long while, and broadly support its aims, but this whole 
thread feels to me like programmers trying to nail jelly on the wall. 
Locking web content into the kinds of boxes that are typical of other 
GUI development environments seems like a guaranteed loss to me overall.

Let authors and app creators use HTML.  It's not that precise but it 
doesn't have to be.  Then layer on CSS, and layer on JavaScript as 
needed.  It doesn't all have to work the same way every time.

Much of what I like about prollyfills and Web Components is that they 
let developers encapsulate these decisions, allowing people to share 
functionality without insisting that they all do it the same way.

I'll write more about this at length someplace when I have time.

Thanks,
-- 
Simon St.Laurent
http://simonstl.com/

Received on Thursday, 23 January 2014 18:11:48 UTC