Re: Visual Markup (should HTML die?)

Have you every actually bothered to use XHTML with CSS2 positioning? The
other day one of my graphic designer friends sent me a mock-up
"screenshot" of a webpage he was playing around with:

1. I loaded up an image manipulator and used it to rip out all the
obvious graphic components (sideways text, pictures, etc.) into seperate
files.

2. I wrote up an XHTML document dividing his content into as many DIVs
as possible.

3. I measured the pixel positions of every part of his mock-up and used
those values to set the top, left, width, and height values in CSS.

4. Put it all together, and it looks *indistinguishable* from his
mock-up -- in IE6, Mozilla, and Safari.

Where would VML have been an improvement, exactly?

However I do agree that more work needs to be put into XSL: after I got
his mock-up looking right, I turned the page into a PHP template being
populated from a database. If I wanted to bring XSL in there, I still
would have needed to write PHP to generate the XML response to my SQL
query. So somewhere between the DBMS and the XHTML, I need a simple,
standard way of turning queries into XML. (Reverse SQL/XML? XPath for
relational data?)

~ Jared Warren <warren@cs.queensu.ca>
Computing Science, Queen's University

Received on Saturday, 22 February 2003 20:37:12 UTC