Re: more CSS and tables

On Tuesday 08 January 2002 21:45, David Woolley wrote:
|   Vadim Plessky wrote:
|   > please provide content when FO)NT can't be replaced with SPAN or DIV
|
|   It's very difficult to think of legitimate uses for SPAN.  DIV might
|   be used to set the overall font for an abstract, as HTML doesn't have
|   structural elements at the DOCBOOK sort of level - it is supposed to
|   be light weight.

AFAIK:  DIV == DIVider
So it's used to divide screen/web page into different sections, not to change 
fonts :-)
|
|   > what's wrong with:
|   >
|   >  so, how you <span style="color: green">suppose</span> to change color
|   > inline?
|   >
|   > I mean, why do you prefer <em> to <span>?
|
|   Because the span indicates that the use of the greeen colour is
|   just a designer's whim, and is complete noise in terms of the
|   meaning, whereas em indidcates the colour is being used to stress
|   the word, and, a good house style will always use the same way of

frankly speaking, I do not understand why you want to "stress" this word.
I prefer to avoid stresses as much as possible :-)

|   stressing, at least in that sort of division, so it can put in the
|   house style rules.  Even if you don't explicitly think of speech
|   browsers, a speech browser can emphasise the em case.  Even if you
|   don't think of monochrome displays, the monochrome browser can
|   bold or italic it.

ok, now we should recall teletype for compatibility issues?
My recent study of web statistics shows that majority of web users (>80%) has 
high-color displays (either 24-bit, 32-bit or at least 16-bit)
So even supporting 8-bit displays doesn't make much sense nowdays...
And you are speaking about monochrome...

|
|   Also, and possibly more importantly, the user knows about em, and
|   can define their own rule, to provide them (or their clients) with
|   a predictable result.  (You could also provide user style sheets that
|   people could use on this and other pages.

excuse me, but I do not know about <em>.
And all people around me (both web developers and web users) do not know 
about <em>.
I do not think that using <b></b> is better than <em></em> as I can also 
argue that not all systems support Bold font.
I think that you can use just <a></a> and define 
a { color: green }
or whatever you want for speach browser.
Than you at least do not forget to add aureal section to stylesheet, and this 
wil work even in browsers not supporting <em>

Sidenote: I have seen many people *avoiding* Netscape and switching to 
Microsoft IE.
Reason? Netscape uses Times (Roman) as default fonts. MS - Arial (SansSerif)
And people do not like Roman fonts on the web, as they look ugly (at low res 
display) and people just want better looking web pages.
That's why, I *always* define font as 'Arial','Helvetica', sanserif in order 
to avoid this effect...
BTW: that's the reason why you just can't use H1, H2, etc. without exactly 
specifying what font it should be. 

|
|   > Hmm... Are you sure that all browsers (or all future versions of
|   > browsers) will support <em>?
|
|   Losing em would lose one of the key essences of HTML.  You would

I personally do not care about loosing <em>
DIV and SPAN do all the tasks for legacy HTML, for XML ... well, you do not 
have pre-defined tags at all :-))

|   probably be left with a page description language, of which there
|   are much better ones, like PDF, although SVG might succeed - it
|   is a PDF descendant.
|
|   > do you see any difference with:
|   >
|   > aa {
|
|   Yes.  The first will generate a tree navigation structure in
|   Amaya, html2ps, and possibly some other browsers, and will

than those tools (Amay and html2ps, in particular) are guilty.
You should write to authors of those tols that they have some bugs and need 
to be fixed.
Or you can use different tools, or develop own tool supporting CSS better.

|   be used to construct the summary of the page by some search
|   engines (according to DJ Delorie), whereas the second will

who is DJ Delorie?
So far, Google is the best search engine, and I doubt you need to use any 
other (from 300+ available) search engine if you are familiar with Google.


|   produce the same effect on a visual browser, but carry no
|   other meaining.  ISO HTML actually has very strong requirements
|   on the use of Hn.

than this "ISO HTML"  just sucks.
I am for the web standards, but you should not adopt everything "as is"
Head is given to the human to *think*, not to follow some Nation Leaders 
(recent experience and a whole 20th century shows that people still tend to 
follow leaders...)

|
|   I'd point out that use of such markup is a requirement of at least
|   one of the WCAG levels.

It's ok with me. :-)
WCAG should achieve some market penetration first in order to be valueable 
argument.
Postings on this list show that even people interested in WAI have a lot of 
confusion with WCAG.
  
-- 

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 22:19:10 UTC