Re: CSS aims

Le 24 janv. 2014 à 04:18, Brian Kardell <bkardell@gmail.com> a écrit :
> One of us is clearly talking past the other. 

fwiw I don't really understand what you are saying either. I understand better Simon. So I think maybe there is a lack of shared definitions. Not the same culture when looking at the Web, not the same past, etc. 

Maybe you should start what you think are the terms you are using such as presentations, meaning, document, structure, etc. and how you articulate them together.

Le 24 janv. 2014 à 02:57, Brian Kardell <bkardell@gmail.com> a écrit :
> 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.

If we are talking about meaning. "ul" is not representing a simple list. It goes a bit deeper than that. It is a keyword that surround a piece of text and says that what's inside is a number of items or things in no particular order (we could imagine a grocery shopping list). It's not often used as is, but let say it matters. We are talking about both meaning and structure here.


> Now let's say you want to add an icon to the left of that - is that style or structure?  

Style. The way you decide to visualize, render the list is clearly style, it doesn't change the concept of a list. Now it becomes muddier if you start to put numbers in front of each items, because there is a specific tool for this, the "ol" keyword. It is where we start using the style to convey semantics to a document. A semantics parser using the knowledge of html would not be able to understand that the intent was this number of items or names are subsequent to each other.

Someone could also argue because of the way the model of the document is defined. The structure at the level of the DOM is always an ordered list, but has nothing to do with the semantics/meaning of the text, it has to with the semantics/meaning of the model and the parsers. The way we decided to compute things.

> 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.


Well, you are mixing visual representation (style) and information (meaning). First of all, you are making the choice of your visual language is clear enough that this icon really means what it means to everyone. The typical realization is all these icons in our UIs with the text equivalents underneath. Then second is the assumption of visual language.

Stop using your eyes, close them, and use a vocal browser. Now how do you convey that meaning of offline/online to the user? There are many things which have to be done so the thing is meaningful. It requires a "message" both at the system and communicated to the human to inform that there is a change of state. 

The fact to associate that to a change in a visual UI is the end of the chain, not the start, and it represents only one channel of communications through a visual language.

-- 
Karl Dubost 🐄
http://www.la-grange.net/karl/

Received on Friday, 24 January 2014 01:02:46 UTC