Re: Positioning HTML Elements with Cascading Style Sheets

On Feb 1,  7:19pm, Todd Fahrner wrote:

> Client side scripting is (a) where the browser
> war battle lines are currently drawn and (b) where document authors and
> graphic designers tend to lack the requisite programming skills. If CSS was
> to end the tag wars, client-side scripting will only replace them with more
> damaging script wars. Effective scripting, much more so than effective
> table structure, is very unlikely to be generated by a robust WYSIWYG
> authoring tool.

Good summary (again). One test of how usable a particular approach will be,
which is interesting even as a thought experiment:

1) generate some styled HTML (ie HTML+CSS, or HTML+DSSSL, or HTML+kooltags,
   or HTML+scripting-language-du-jour) using GUI tool X

2) Read this into GUI tool Y, which is on a different platform and written
   by a different vendor. Make structural changes. Save

3) Read this into GUI tool Z. Big overhaul on the stylistic look of the
   document. Save.

Is this likely to work? This is what I am thinking when reading a proposal.


> I may be wasting my time, what with Netscape's J-ESS (or JASS or JSSS or
> whatever) and Microsoft's Trident headed for public beta.

Both of these are somewhat orthogonal in that they provide a query interface
to the HTML content and the stylsheet info (and environmental info also).
Certainly they could be hacked to simulate stylesheets, at the cost of
portability; some people will do this. But most won't for the same reason
that most folk ship around HTML pages and documented image formats rather
than shipping around whatever internal representation some browser holds
in memory for display.



-- 
Chris Lilley, W3C                          [ http://www.w3.org/ ]
Graphics and Fonts Guy            The World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/people/chris/              INRIA,  Projet W3C
chris@w3.org                       2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
+33 (0)4 93 65 79 87       06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Monday, 3 February 1997 11:52:28 UTC