RE: is anyone interested in XHTML?

Tantek Çelik wrote:

> Unfortunately, there appears to be a trend developing in various recent
> proposals which sacrifice this kind of inline simplicity in deference to some
> altar of purity.
...
> If you think it is important to keep allowing things to be *simple* in this
> way, and to keep allowing this *choice* (e.g. as HTML4 and CSS-1 provided with
> <LINK>, <STYLE> and STYLE=), speak up.

Keep them in.  If inline/embedded CSS is removed, nobody will pay any attention
and you have ivory-tower irrelevancy.  Inline and Embedded CSS are just too darn
convenient.

The problem here is in killing things until there is critical mass toward a
proper replacement -- not to mention tool support and paradigm shifts.  In five
or ten years when authoring tools automatically open a LINKed stylesheet with
styled IDs and CLASSes for all the document's IDs/CLASSes, maybe then we could
discuss removing inline and embedded CSS.

(Speaking of LINKed, whatever has happened to "XML Packaging", which appears as
an item on the XML Activity page but whose Activity is apparently so classified
that they'd have to kill you if they told you about it?)

I fully understand conscientious objection to inline CSS, but it is curious that
a number of the  objectors are also advocates of XSL FOs.  Now if FOs ain't
"inline", I don't know what *is*!  XSL FOs may have a future (especially for
print, PDF, and the like), but they are not (IMO) a replacement on the Web for
CSS, inline or otherwise.  They *may* become a replacement at some point in the
future, but last time I looked, even version 1.0 was a *long* way off from Rec
status, much less implementation.

Allow choice, at least until there is critical mass behind changing something.
Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

PS.  In the interim, it will be nice when the "WYSIWIG"[1] tools generate

	a) inline CSS for font/color/size, etc. (first drafts)
	b) had a "Move-inline-to-Embedded" command (subsequent drafts)
	c) had a "Move-embedded-to-Linked" command (final)

FrontPage has a ways to go -- maybe you can tweak them?  :)

[1] Or WYSIOP -- What You See Is One Possibility.  A better concept when it
comes to the Web and coined, I believe, by Chris Lilley.


/Jelks

Received on Thursday, 17 February 2000 15:34:13 UTC