Re: XBL is (mostly) W3C redundant, and CSS is wrong W3C layer for semantic behavior *markup

At 11:42 PM 1/5/2003 +0000, Ian Hickson wrote:
>> However, if you instead used the CSS "display" property to change a
>> <li> into a <table> element, then you would be creating
>> non-conforming semantics.
>
>CSS is unable to do this. Even XBL is unable to do this.
>
>All CSS and XBL can do is change the _rendering_ of the element so
>that it happens to use table-like layout.


I meant "table-cell", per David Hyatt's examples:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2003Jan/0085.html

"Using pure CSS, I can turn an <li> into a table-cell, or make a <table>
into a block, or generate content before and after an element."


>In any case, there isn't any clause in the HTML specification that
>says that rendering <li> elements with table layout is wrong. (I
>checked.)


Then in that case, display is "presentation".

But all cases of "display" would need to be analyzed against the HTML spec
before striking the optionality clause from the CSS spec.  I am not 100%
confident that all cases of display changes will not violate some aspect of
HTML spec.


>>> But I'm even more suspicious of efforts that promote sending
>>> generic XML over the net for general purpose documents.
>> 
>> If I markup all the dates in my document using a custom tag
>> <mydates>, it doesn't cause any harm.
>
>This is a huge misconception of the XML groupies.


XML "groupies" are also member of W3C and I wonder how they would react to
your characterization of them as "groupies".  Does that advance your
argument somehow??


> It _does_ cause
>harm.


Go tell it on the XML mountain.  This list is not the proper forum.  In the
XML forum, the experts can properly debate you.


> It means that implementations that do not apply your style hints
>will totally fail to convey the document in any reasonable way.


Similar to if CSS "display:none" removes content at presentation?


>You can actually see this now with documents that use <table> elements
>for layout, or <div> elements for styling. Non-visual and non-CSS UAs
>respectively don't have any chance of rendering the document usefully.


Custom tags is actually a direction towards correcting that problem.

[...]
Highly subjective debate deleted.

-Shelby Moore

Received on Sunday, 5 January 2003 19:02:34 UTC