Re: a new value for <title> and other meta tags

You can do all that which you propose with either servers-side or 
client-side scripting. Do not try to mess-up XHTML for a doubtable 
convenience.


Chris Mannal wrote:

>For what it's worth, it would be fairly easy to achieve this with CSS if
>you could convince the CSS working group of its practical use. For
>example, CSS already defines the :before pseudo-element and the content
>property, which could potentially be used in this manner:
>
><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
><head>
><title id="documentTitle">the title of my document</title>
><style type="text/css">/*<![CDATA[*/
>body:before { content:#documentTitle; }
>/*]]>*/</style>
></head>
><body>
><p>My text</p>
></body>
></html>
>
CSS should not modify the page contents. CSS means Cascading *Style 
Sheets*; it is intended to separate presentation from structure, it's 
not tolerable the possibility to wreck a document changing or disabling 
its style sheet. These tasks can be easily and gracefully performed by 
server-side scripts or, for particular needings, by client-side ECMAScript.
I think that also several uses for :after and :before, how handy soever 
they may be, should be performed by scripts.

*        *        *        [an HR :D ]        *        *         *

XHTML is not intended to be simple: it should be either a language to 
make structural, meaningful markup, or a collection of languages 
presented as the very least that every web browser should implement; it 
must not be a trivial version for those who don't want to learn XML, RDF 
and all the Xfoo family.

Most likely in the future common people will use good authoring tools 
instead of a subset of HTML 3.2, or there will be friendly tutorials 
that you will teach you to start each page with that code, to make a 
link with those xlink:href and xlink:type="simple", and to structure 
your document in that way; but CSS (or XSL) remains a complex beast, so 
I think that authoring tools will rule.

Received on Friday, 23 August 2002 13:49:12 UTC