Re: Positioning HTML Elements with Cascading Style Sheets

At 05:21 PM 2/1/97 -0800, Todd Fahrner wrote:
s is of course crucial. But would such a tool be capable of generating
>HTML whose presentation adapts gracefully to varying browser window
>resolutions and aspect ratios? If not, then it's WYSIWIM
>("what-you-see-is-what-I-might") and therefore not truly portable. Absolute
>positioning is possible today with GIFs and tables (cf. NetObjects Fusion),
>but this printlike capability is a mixed blessing at best. PDF is at least
>resolution-independent.

Using gifs to to position things doesn't work all that well is the least
degradable way to do things, and allows for no considderation of what I'm
using to view the document.  Tables are such a complex layout device that
only the human mind can really use them to lay out a page in the most
effective manner, and they are also a hack that does not degade well if you
are using them for presntational purposes.

Positioning allows tools that write out good html, and allow the author to
decide upon what the page looks like.  As for a good degradation strategy,
that is where client side scripting comes in.  The if the author of a
document is going to claim ablute athorial control in the rendering of the
page, then that author needs to supply the clients browser with infomation
on how to degrade the page down.  It's gotten beyond the "simple" (please
note the irony quotes) system that most browsers use today.  On pages where
the presentational aspects of a page are of importance then the degradation
strategy needs to be more dynamic.


----------------------------------------------------------------------
|     "How long have you been wanting me to talking like a bot?"     |
---------------------------------------------------taylor@hotwired.com

Received on Saturday, 1 February 1997 20:40:30 UTC