RE: New Working Draft : BECSS

Chris, I apologize for the delay in responding to this thread ...

I wrote:

> > I am curious as to what has happened to Action Sheets.  The
> > first editor of BECSS mentioned is Vidur Apparao of Netscape
> > (who also submitted CAS), yet BECSS reads like it popped
> > right out of Redmond.  I thought CAS a superior mechanism
> > than using CSS style sheets to bring in scripts.  What were
> > the reasons for dropping CAS in favor of "CSS behaviors"?

Chris Wilson wrote:

> In discussions with the CSS WG, it was generally agreed that integrating the
> ideas in Action Sheets into CSS was a better idea that writing yet another
> format - which is why, contrary to your statement that BECSS sounds like it
> came straight out of Redmond, BECSS contains things like event handler
> definitions in CSS and embedded scripts.  BECSS is a combination and
> improvement of Action Sheets, DHTML behaviors and HTML Components.

Mixing style declarations in CSS with stuff like:

	h1 { onclick: "func(event)" }
	p#foo { behavior: url(foo.htc) }

seems as much a hack as <FONT> & Co. were inside markup.  Especially with the
current talk of packaging which would (one would hope, anyway) provide much
better linking mechanisms. Mixing presentation into the content bag proved a
disaster.  Now we want to throw behavior into the style bag?

It sure would be nice if those discussions were more public -- how and why such
a thing was "generally agreed" to be a "better idea". What was the reasoning
behind wanting to cause CSS authors (who have enough troubles trying to deal
with buggy and incomplete CSS implementations in the various browsers) to
additionally have to wade through a bunch of 'onwhatevers' and 'behaviors'
strewn throughout CSS style declarations?

Could we not please keep style in CSS and move behavior to another mechanism?
Behaviors-expressed-in-CSS-like-notation is fine, but I feel strongly that
behavior declarations do not belong in a CSS stylesheet.

/Jelks

Received on Monday, 27 September 1999 03:15:43 UTC