Re: The canvas

Tantek Celik wrote:
> Having implemented this both ways I can tell you that almost
every page that
> has a background image looks quite broken when you alter its
reference
> point.  This is because it turns out most pages with
background images use
> them to simulate some sort of vertical background color bar
(or bars) to
> which then the rest of the markup (tables typically) is
carefully aligned.

IMO, such pages are broken to begin with, and most of them
LOOK broken on high-res displays already. Many of them have
insufficient width on the background image to avoid seeing a
second instance of it when a UA window is larger than 800 x
600. Others are dependent on particular fonts to avoid severe
ugliness in table cells so carefully aligned for the specific
platform the author is working on (if it works on one, it'll
work on all, right?). Very shortsighted. This reminds me of
another common silliness of hard-coding table cell heights to
pixel values but not pixel-sizing the text within. The search
page of a large distributor has table cells hard-coded. But,
of course, text inside the cells is not. The form is unusable
on a high ppi display.

> My experience has been that authors using CSS (or HTML or
any other web
> authoring language) rarely read the actual spec, and
typically learn by
> experimenting with a particular browser. Once they get
something to look the
> way they want it to, they expect that to not break.
>
> More often than not authors will also check to make sure
things look ok in
> at least one more browser.  But if they just happen to make
use of something
> which two or more browser implementations implement the same
(even if it is
> not to spec), they come to believe that that behavior is
"correct" and if
> some other browser doesn't exhibit this "correct" behavior,
then it is
> "broken".  Note: I'm not saying that's necessarily my
opinion, just the
> predominant impression I have gotten from web authors.
>
> Tantek
>
>

Received on Friday, 19 November 1999 13:04:20 UTC