Re: Comments on Cougar DTD (fwd) -Reply

>>> MegaZone <megazone@livingston.com> 07/17/96 04:07pm >>>
>Once upon a time Arnoud "Galactus" Engelfriet shaped the
>electrons to say...
>>May I add that we mark FONT and CENTER as deprecated, and remove
>the
>>FACE attribute for FONT altogether? With the support for style
>sheets

I agree about making FONT and CENTER deprecated.

>Why?
>1. I will still argue that FONT as in the DTD is not bad - some 
>implementations are poor.  The main complaint about it has been
>the color setting that doesn't get turned off when the user
>selects their own  settings - this is implementation.  The
>ability to set the size and color in the document itself with
>FONT is very nice, and very simple.  The same could be done with
>style sheets - but why force everyone to use CSS when they don't
>need the complexity?  I am loathe to try and teach CSS to all the
>people here doing little things for the web, while most of them 
>understand FONT just fine.

I disagree.  The larger your scale, the greater the 
advantage of CSS. <Font> is easier only when you're 
writing very, very small peices of text.

<P align=center><Font face="arial" size="+1"> Paragraph</font>

VS.

<P style="font-size:+1; font-family:arial; text-align=center">
Paragraph

But how many people write web pages with only one paragraph?
Consider this:

<P align=center><Font face="arial" size="+1"> First par.</font>
<P align=center><Font face="arial" size="+1"> second par.</font>

VS.

<DIV style="font-size:+1; font-family:arial; text-align=center">
<P > First par. <P > second par.
</DIV>

And the larger your scale it becomes more apparent that
it's easier to use style attributes or links than to 
put <font> tags everywhere.

>2. CENTER is *way* too widespread to ever leave the spec, why
>bother deprecating it when it is just the same thing as <div
>align=center> anyway.
>Is there some problem with having an alias like that?

As was mentioned before, it bloats up the spec.  
Considering that Netscape had already begun to support 
<DIV align="center">, it's my opinion that <center> 
should have never made it into Wilbur anyway.

I would hope that making it deprecated would spur 
the makers of GUI HTML tools to use <DIV ALIGN="center">
over <center>, but I don't think it would actually keep
anyone from using it, if they wanted to, to write 
validated HTML with the non-strict option. (Someone 
please correct me if I'm wrong on this.)

>3. You *never* just drop tags from one release to the next -
>dropping features is an extreme evil and you will get a backlash

I also disagree that dropping tags is an *extreme* 
evil, but it should be done responsibly.  I'd like to 
think that mistakes could be rectified.

>from it.  And your argument for dropping it is weak - so what if
>CSS is around?  Just because there is another way to alter the
>font doesn't mean it obsoletes FACE.   Again, CSS is unintuitive
>to a great many users.

CSS isn't a big deal to learn.  I was talking to a friend 
of mine who writes fiction as a hobby.  He didn't even 
know what a font was.  I would consider him pretty bright 
anyway.  My point is that new users are going to have to 
learn *SOMETHING* new, so it's probably best if they 
learn something that will scale.

>>I would be very surprised if popular browsers would interpret
>><UL PLAIN> as <UL TYPE=plain> and render an unbulleted list.
>
>So would I - but I'd still like the PLAIN variation even if it
>means
><UL type=plain>
>
>>> 6. Any reason why certain elements don't have %attrs; in the
>ATTLIST?
>>>    Examples: ADDRESS (can't do <address class=signature>?),
>DIR, MENU,
>>>    IMG (can't specify image size via style sheets?)
>>ALL block elements should have those attributes, including ALIGN
>and
>>CLASS.
>
>Agreed.

Me too.

>-MZ
>--



Charles Taylor
My opinions are my own.

Received on Thursday, 18 July 1996 15:16:19 UTC