Re: CSS aims

It seems to me this thread has strayed away from the original question, which is in itself fairly interesting.

"Is it plausible to imagine a clean/reasonably complete decoupling of presentation from structure without adding dubious amounts of complexity?”

Part of the problem with the question is “dubious amounts of complexity” is very ill defined and largely a subjective value judgment. I guarantee that my bar for dubious amounts of complexity is probably lower than many devs. While we’re all relating our past scars, I’ve seen very many cases of this—introducing extra complexity for the sake of conceptual purity (even when motivated towards otherwise good ends). This is across numerous technologies and frameworks...

Anyways, to answer the question, I think we’d have to have some shared sense of what “dubious amounts of complexity” is, and I doubt that’s gonna happen, because, again, it’s a value judgment tied up in the perceived goods/goals of any given design. 

It’s also subject to a question of who has to face the complexity and when. 

The same problem exists for “clean/reasonably complete.”  The qualifiers are going to rely on the observer’s judgment. 

I suspect there are plenty of HTML wonks who think the current spec is a pretty good incarnation of what you are asking for. The problem is the world that they imagine HTML thriving in is far less complex than the reality of the world we actually live in.

And there’s the rub—none of us has the capability to grapple with the staggering complexities of all of the real-world usage scenarios of Web UI technologies. Anyone who says differently is selling something. And those scenarios are growing exponentially in step with increasingly ubiquitous computing.

In the face of such real life complexity, any proposal that claims it can achieve clean/reasonably complete decoupling without dubious amounts of complexity must necessarily fudge something. Either it fudges the meanings of the vague terms, or it vastly limits its problem domain. 

Now does that mean we throw in the towel? Of course not. Does that mean we swing the pendulum back to inline/mixing in everything? Of course not. It simply acknowledges the reality that we are faced with and suggests that while not sacrificing the good principle of decoupling (which has definite practical benefits, not just academic/conceptual purity), we shouldn’t expect to find a solution that magically makes the complexity go away. It just migrates around.

And that’s why I actually thought this was a decent statement/approach to deal with the question:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html-design-principles/#priority-of-constituencies (thanks, Marcos)

Although I find it still smacks of too much document-content-centricity, the underlying sentiment points in the right direction. It’s easy to champion principles (like SoC) over competing practical realities and/or other competing principles. The trick is finding a good balance between them.

In any case, one of the things that I find motivational about this group is the idea that we take a practical-first approach—letting the future emerge evolutionarily from real-world usage (hacking) and concerns, iteratively improving, rather than expecting a group of people to preemptively imagine (and sufficiently design for) all possible cases. That is, as I see it, both the only practical, and indeed the best, way forward for the Web.

-a