Re: New Working Draft : BECSS

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

I am not ChrisW but I participated in the BECSS discussion so here is
a reply to your mail. Of course, I do not express the opinion of Chris
Wilson or anyone else here.

> 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?

Not at all. BECSS use the CSS syntax and CSS selecting mechanism but
do not deal with styles. It is not proposed to add scripting
facilities to CSS. A new "language" is built and this language and css
rules are close enough so they can stand in a single file. That's
all. As a document provider, I see absolutely no reason to keep :

	DIV.foo > P#bar + TABLE { text-align : center }

and :

	DIV.foo > P#bar + TABLE { onclick : "func(event)" }

in two single files/objects/whatever when it can be easily agregated
in :

	DIV.foo > P#bar + TABLE { text-align : center ;
				  onclick : "func(event)" }

> 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?

Microsoft and Netscape submitted two proposals to the W3C. The CSS+FP
WG decided that (a) behaviors are an interesting thing (b) the two
proposals could be harmonized (c) the two proposals being partly based
on the css general syntax, the best place to discuss them was the
CSS+FP WG because people with CSS knowledge are there... BECSS are a
draft, nothing more but nothing less than a draft. It went public just
to get this kind of public feedback. It went public exactly the same
way other documents in the W3C process go public : discussed
internally first among WG members.

> 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.

I'll keep in mind that last sentence. Let me now give you my opinion :
my company got involved in the BECSS discussion because we strongly
believe that such a way of declaring behaviors is the easiest and
cheapest way to help us building a real intranet in the energy
industrial field, distributing our web components all over the country
in all our sites. All the mechanisms now appearing in some other parts
of the W3C are still highly unstable and it'll take tiiiiiiime until
we get (a) browsers' support (b) deployment of these browsers over our
130,000 computers (guess how long it takes to update 130,000
computers!). The CSS linking mechanism is already here and perfectly
functional.  BECSS provide a way of declaring behaviors that can be
agregated to styles ***without modifying CSS itself***. It's enough
for the "very-big-document-and-apps-provider" part of Electricité de
France and we see no real serious reason but "religious" not
agregating BECSS rules and CSS rules in a single object.
XML, and sub-technologies, is agregating the document instance, the
styles, the transformations and so on in the single object. So what ?

Last but not least, the 2 major browser vendors agree on that
mechanism and sat quickly at the same discussion table. Hey, isn't it
a real miracle ?-)))

</Daniel>

Received on Monday, 27 September 1999 03:46:49 UTC