- From: Matthew Raymond <mattraymond@earthlink.net>
- Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2004 08:39:36 -0400
Lachlan Hunt wrote:
> I think you may have misunderstood me. Tabs are presentational in the
> sense that they produce a set of tabs along the top, or down the side,
> or wherever else, that allows switching between each pane. However,
> there is, of course, structure used to create those tabs. ie. Each pane
> is a seperate section from the other panes, and this is the structure
> that should be marked up.
A structure that acts as a container for controls and other
elements, that is separate from other such containers. How does this not
describe <frameset>? Furthermore, <frameset> has an existing structure
to name each section: <legend>. The element <div> does not.
> It should not be marked up that these
> sections should be displayed as tabs. This should be left for the style
> sheet.
No, how the tabs should look or be oriented should be left to the
style sheet. The tabs themselves are a form of control used to manage
and organize data.
Replacing markup with HTML+CSS+Javascript does little to protect the
semantic purity of HTML while it significantly increases complexity. For
instance, I could use style sheets and Javascript to create a table
without using any of the HTML table elements, but this means recreating
both the organizational structure of tables and recreating the default
styling of tables. Why would we want to make the webmaster do all this
just to avoid introducing a small bit of additional markup?
The bottom line is that you're depending on three technologies to
create a very basic control instead of one. These technologies are not
equally supported in all User Agents, and do not necessarily have the
same performance on every platform.
For instance, in Netscape Navigator 4.0, your example
(http://www.alistapart.com/d/eatcake/5.html) doesn't work at all. With
Javascript turned off, all of the panels in the example display at the
same time. My solution using <frameset> would have at least degraded
into a series of labeled frames with borders in NN4.
Why pursue a solution that degrades poorly, is more complex and
requires a greater number of standards to be supported? Besides, the
whole point of specs like Web Apps 1.0 is to provide an easy way to
generate common controls like tabs. Semantic purity is all find and
dandy, but when dealing with web apps, an extreme level of semantic
purity is counterproductive.
Received on Tuesday, 29 June 2004 05:39:36 UTC