Re: Proposal for non-normative example section (Was: RE: How is it possible to devise such a feeble system?)

On Wednesday 24 October 2001 23:48, Jesse McCarthy wrote:
|   Vadim Plessky <plessky@cnt.ru> wrote on 10/24/01 10:52:00 PM:
|   >Ha-ha!..
|   >"The fact that the ability to achieve what I described does not exist in
|   > CSS 2 is abusrd"
|   >
|   >As about CSS - well, CSS development is not stopped (yet)
|   >So, we *can* make additions to CSS specs, and force changes.
|
|   Well there's no time like the present, of course it could well be too
| late to make it into this generation of browsers anyway.

What do you understand under "this generation of browsers"?
MS IE6/Netscape 6.1?
Well, none of them has full support for CSS2.
And it seems that MacIE5 is the only one which has full CSS1 support.

So, maybe, it's good time right now to *forget* CSS2, put all efforts on 
CSS3, and get it out ASAP.
I don't know what "ASAP" can mean for W3C consortium, but March-April of 2002 
sounds quite reasonable for me.

I am speaking here about *core* modules, like inheritance, selectors (where I 
believe not a lot should be added), LineText and BoxModel module.
(see also my comments on CSS3 Box Model, as *simplifying it* is crucial for 
success)
I don't care so much about Tables module, but, in my opinion, we should have 
something ready for Positioning module as well.
    
|
|   >CSS3 has modular concept, which is Good.
|   >Unfortunately, number of modules is too big, and some modules look like
|   >rather useless for me.
|
|   Isn't that the point of modularity?

No, this is not the case.
It's nice to have module for *something*, but why you should bother to have 
such module if nobody is going to implement it?

Also, face such situation: Mozilla/Netscape implemented, say, CSS3 UI module. 
Microsoft  - not implemented.
Would somebody take care of CSS3 UI module in this case? 
I guess - not.
So, my point is that we need to have (in W3C standards/recommendations) only 
modules which will be implemented *both* by Netscape/Mozilla and Microsoft.
(as MS and Netscape are two leading browsers at a market nowdays)

I hope that Konqueror will pick up soon, and overgrow Mozilla/NS in visible 
future. Than things will be easy. Konqueror emulates MS IE's "quirk" mode 
pretty well (but implementing this consumed a lot of resources), for 
standards-compliant (Strict) mode you don't have such development overhead. 
You just need to implement standard. So I would say in such scenario we will 
get standards-compliant web space just in case only Microsoft (but not 
Netscape) implemented CSS3.  KHTML will be there as well, so both leading 
browsers will fully support CSS3 (core).
Now question is how fast Microsoft can implement CSS3, in case standard is 
"fixed". We can only guess here :-)
There is an opinion (from some Konqueror developers)  that some parts of CSS2 
are very difficult to implement, and implementing those parts just doesn't 
worth efforts.
Compact, clear, non-misleading CSS3 specification will allow KDE developers 
to skip CSS2, so we will get standard-compliant web space *faster*.
As I said, CSS3's modular concept is Good. We just  need to define good set 
of modules, and fix all bugs in those modules ASAP.
And get commitment from Netscape and Microsoft to implement those modules. 
But it's already another story ...
-- 

Vadim Plessky
http://kde2.newmail.ru  (English)
33 Window Decorations and 6 Widget Styles for KDE
http://kde2.newmail.ru/kde_themes.html
KDE mini-Themes
http://kde2.newmail.ru/themes/

Received on Thursday, 25 October 2001 06:40:23 UTC