Re: 'style' attribute

On Mon, 23 Feb 2004 21:53:42 +0000, Toby A Inkster wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 23, 2004 at 08:04:04AM -0800, Brian Bober wrote:
> > All I was saying that since the most popular browser doesn't support CSS1
> > fully, that we wouldn't be losng much by switching to a new style standard.
>
> So because 80%-90% of users use a browser that doesn't support CSS1, we
> should switch to a different styling language that precisely 0% of browsers
> support?
>
> Makes perfect sense.

This is a bit off-topic for this list and when I mentioned that, it was part of
discussion about what things pure HTML does better than HTML + CSS.

Actually, I was saying that it would be a good excuse to make a new standard.
CSS was a good idea, but I believe its fallen short of its goal of separation
of style and content because of things its lacking, and because is too
complicated for the average person to work with because of all the box models
and such. Yet, it was functional enough to give people an idea of what a style
system could do and even for things that CSS is lacking (i.e. something to
fully replace tables) could still be applied to the style and content
seperation idea.

Therefore, I just thought of something:

** W3 could define higher-level style languages that are defined in terms of
CSS and a browser could convert to CSS much like programming languages can be
compiled to assembler **

As we know, IE and Mozilla and many other software programs use CSS for layout
of their user-interface. CSS paired with something like XUL seems to handle all
they need.

Then I think about how you have assembler, and higher level languages for
programming. When CSS does everything people will need, it'll be extremely
complicated for the average user. Yet HTML allows you to define which style
system you are using in a style block. We only have CSS. If we had higher-level
styling languages, people could use a combination of them, perhaps, in order to
facilitate things they need to do. i.e, there could be perhaps a styling
language that allows you to center a block simply with one property as opposed
to doing the "margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto" since one of peoples'
biggest complaints is that some things were easier to do in HTML. Higher-level
style languages could handle that, for instance we could have a language called
"HTML-Style" or something.

In fact, the browser need not natively handle these languages if plugins could
be made for them. Or, they could simply be for developmental cases and testing,
and then be compiled for the developer to CSS for a production version of a site.

Received on Wednesday, 25 February 2004 10:55:09 UTC