Style attribute and BR vs L (was: XHTML 2.0 considered harmful)

Tantek Çelik wrote:
> On 1/15/03 7:06 AM, "Mikko Rantalainen" <mira@cc.jyu.fi> wrote:
>>Ian Hickson wrote:
>>>On Wed, 15 Jan 2003, Daniel Glazman wrote:
>>>
>>I agree. It seems that those who prefer br over l are the same ones that
>>want to keep the style attribute.
> 
> False.  I prefer <L> over <BR> as a wrote in this thread already, and I want
> to keep the style attribute.

Well, I'm afraid you're an exception. I cannot imagine even one valid 
reason to use br instead of l.

>>If you feel that you have to use br or style attribute try to think for
>>a second what's the reason you "need" those. Think about *why* you're
>>trying to achieve the line break or specific styling, not *what* you're
>>trying to achieve.
> 
> If you cannot see the need for the style attribute, it may simply indicate
> that you have not experienced the real world situations where it is
> necessary.  

Please, *show* me a real world example where style attribute cannot be 
easily replaced with id + CSS and the situation isn't because of 
brain-dead administration. If administrator is too dumb to fix the issue 
deeper in the system then the site should be using old transitonal 
document types anyway.

Everyone defending style attribute just repeats how that's needed in 
real world problems but nobody is seems to be able to show even one 
reasonable example.

> I think this is in general the problem with the discussion of the 'style'
> attribute.  On one side there are semantic purists that don't understand
> what the problem is and therefore claim there is no problem, and on the
> other side there are _experienced_ folks that have seen numerous real world
> situations where the style attribute is not only useful, but essential.
> 
> These real world situations have been listed in threads in this list, but
> always ignored or belittled.

Perhaps those issues weren't big enough to justify the style attribute. 
With the help of a good enough example, I'm sure we can generate enough 
noise to get the style attribute back *if* it's really needed.

As I said, style attribute shouldn't be kept just to workaround messed 
up markup. I'll change my mind about this issue immediatly somebody can 
show an example where the markup is logical but use of style attribute 
still makes sense.

And just for the record, I've programmed multiple systems that use CSS 
and class attributes for all the styling needed.

>>And what comes to teaching a document markup language to new people,
>>XHTML2 looks like much simpler as a whole than XHTML1.x.
> 
> Then don't call it XHTML2.  Call it something else, like "SHML" (Simplified
> Hypertext Markkup Language).

What makes you think that XHTML2 is so far from XHTML1.1? The missing br 
or h1-h6 elements? The missing style attribute? IMO, most of the changes 
are pretty trivial--but still needed IMO--and simply upgrading *major* 
version number should be enough. Just like any software/development 
library/anything you use might be incompatible with previous version 
once the major version number changes. If XHTML2 sounds too scary for 
many people, then concurrent development should be started for XHTML1.2.

-- 
Mikko

Received on Wednesday, 15 January 2003 11:50:16 UTC