Re: Cascading Style Sheets

At 21:54 -0500 7.3.97, Gregory Houston wrote:

>Another note for Chris Wilson and Scott. I think another thing that lead
>me astray was my observation of the sample CSS pages at microsoft.com: I
>checked the source code on several of Microsoft's example CSS pages, and
>all of them [that I looked at] used tables to define the colored
>rectangles backdropping all the new wild layered text effects. It might
>be helpful if some of the pages used the CSS layers instead for this. I
>believe in both HotWired and WebReview that there were statements
>stating that one of the "cool" things about CSS was that you no longer
>had to mess with the <table>s.

I hasten to add that Microsoft's CSS Gallery pages [1], in general, have
had a profoundly negative impact on the design community's assessment of
CSS, at least after the initial 5-minute thrill wears off. The fact that
these gallery pages are totally unintelligible in non-CSS browsers is
contrary to one of the core design principles of CSS: degradability.

Now that near-complete implementations of CSS exist (beta or otherwise), I
would think it wise to pull the gallery pages, as a way to emphasize the
real promise of CSS as something beyond a browser-specific amalgam of
structure and style.

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/truetype/css/gallery/slide5.htm

________________________________________
Todd Fahrner
mailto:fahrner@pobox.com
http://www.verso.com/

The printed page transcends space and time. The printed page, the
infinitude of books, must be transcended. THE ELECTRO-LIBRARY.

--El Lissitzky, 1923

Received on Friday, 4 July 1997 02:31:08 UTC