- From: Todd <fahrner@pobox.com>
- Date: Tue, 8 Jul 1997 10:06:41 -0700
- To: Liam Quinn <liam@htmlhelp.com>, www-style@w3.org
At 8:25 AM -0400 7/8/97, Liam Quinn wrote: >At 11:50 PM 07/07/97 -0700, Simon Daniels wrote: >>As has been noted, It's impossible to use CSS to create interesting >>pages that work well in all the current browsers that claim support for >>CSS, let alone those that don't. This is because things like CSS layers >>aren't in IE3, and margins behave differently in different >>implementations. > >Margins and layers should not be critical to the content of a page, so >such CSS-styled pages should be accessible in all browsers. I can almost agree, but layers do complicate the question by losing the necessity - and sometimes the possibility - of linear coherence without CSS. You can't always go from 3 axes (xyz) to 2 without critical information loss. But I agree that authors should avoid CSS-dependence where possible. Si attaches special significance to the existence of browsers that "claim support for CSS." Whether they claim support is immaterial, however; what matters is how well. If they don't support the standard extensively, according to the best common understanding of its meaning, then its support is inferior, and that can be dangerous. I'm drafting chapters for a book in which I recommend using scripts to serve one or more browser/version/platform-specific CSS files only to implementations the designer has tested personally. All others get plain HTML. This will spare designers a lot of grief trying to reconcile the CSS implementations, especially for more subtle effects, and encourage authors to start with broadly intelligible HTML, just as print designers begin with finished copy and graphical assets. It should also encourage designers to concentrate on the best CSS implementations available on their platform, and not worry about the often alarming CSS side-effects elsewhere. >>If anyone can point us to interesting CSS pages that don't use margins >>or tables and work in all the browsers that claim CSS support then we'd >>love to see them. To the best of my knowledge they don't exist and never >>will. > >What is "interesting"? It sounds like you want pages that do things never >seen before, but that's not the purpose of CSS. A good style sheet should >go unnoticed by the user. Well, there are those of us who can't obey traffic signs before analyzing their composition, so I can't go this far. To assert that interesting pages will never exist across multiple implementations is to assert that (a) content is uninteresting, (b) vendors will never patch the gaps and bugs in their CSS implementations, and (c) authors will always allow their content to be held hostage to a particular browser's CSS implementation quirks. If this is what you mean, Si, I hope your opinions carry little weight with your employer.
Received on Tuesday, 8 July 1997 14:34:05 UTC