Re: more CSS and tables

On Monday 07 January 2002 22:04, David Woolley wrote:
|   Vadim Plessky wrote:
|   > Now I realize that during 1.5 months that I am subscribed to this list,
|   > none was asking "how using pixels instead of points affects site
|   > accessibility"
|
|   I think most accept that both are bad.  One should use relative sizes.
|   My impression, though, is that you are really a prsentatationalist with
|   a thing against software from commercial organisations (excepting
|   consortia of commercial organisations), otherwise you would he using
|   PDF, which *is* intended for reproducible rendering.

I hgave nothing against software from "commercial organisations" when it has 
adequate quality.
Problem is that usually all "commercial" software just sucks.
I was very excited in 1995 when MS introduced Windows 95.
It was real break-through, no doubt.
It had 32-bit internal architecture (in most modules, but not in all), 
TrueType fonts, comprehensive set of drivers, etc.
Win95 as a *product mix* was indeed very good. 
And you could close your eyes on bad parts of it (instant crashes, 
incompatibility among applications, lack of important/interesting features) 
just because it was mostly doing its job.
Microsoft promised to fix the bugs...
3 years later, Windows98 was out, which was just minor bugfix release to 
Win95.
Oops... That's the time when I started to worry...
Obviously, 3 years is *enough* to fix the bugs.
And Microsoft, despite having billions of $$$ in cache and short-term 
investements, failed!...
In 2000, they produced Windows Me, which was just a joke... many people 
reported that it was even more buggy than Win98!

As about PDF: look at incompatibility between different versions of PDF, lack 
of tools to *edit* it (not to read/render, but to *edit*!), and missing 
support for PDF in Microsoft OSes.
So, there is no way you can call PDF suitable either for "reproducible 
rendering" or for "content distribution"
PDF is just polished PostScript, which is slowly dieing.

|
|   Pages shouldn't break when the size is maximised and locked by the
|   user, although most non-trivial designs will break.
|
|   (Designers have a particular problem, in that they tend to have
|   good eyesight and tend to select excessively small fonts.)

"small fonts" effect is caused by brokeness of default stylesheet in MS IE 
for Windows.

|
|   > In my opinion, there are 3 important "constructions" in Visual
|   > BoxRendering Model:
|   >  * inline
|   >  * block
|   >  * inline-block
|
|   This is a pure presentationalist position.

Nope.
Aureal rendering is somewhat easy part ... if you have aureal rendering 
engine.
Problem is that there is  no good (free) aureal rendering engine, especially 
for Russian language. In my opinion, English language is rather simple to 
read, and building reader for it should not be a problem. But if you take 
languages with cases (Russian and Serbian in particular), it becames really 
difficult.
So, instead of focusing on theoretical aspects of CSS, I prefer to work on 
practical issues.
Missing support for {display: inline-block} is one of majore issues in CSS2 
(and CSS1) at a moment.

Cheers, 
-- 

Vadim Plessky
http://kde2.newmail.ru  (English)
33 Window Decorations and 6 Widget Styles for KDE
http://kde2.newmail.ru/kde_themes.html
KDE mini-Themes
http://kde2.newmail.ru/themes/

Received on Tuesday, 8 January 2002 14:24:26 UTC