- From: Afternoon <afternoon@uk2.net>
- Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2003 17:32:09 +0100
- To: www-style@w3.org
On Thursday, Jul 3, 2003, at 17:18 Europe/London, Simon Jessey wrote: > supposed to be regarded as continuous visual media But it isn't. Despite all the good ideas that have come from HTML as a document language, it is used as a document language, an interface language, a general purpose XML grammar and several other things. Advances would be made more quickly if they were aimed at the current situation, rather than a theoretical one. I'm not saying either is the case at the moment however, just that you have to be pragmatic when you've got how ever many hundred million of users. > CSS-P does provide a mechanism for orienting elements with respect to > the viewport in the rule position:fixed Fixed does not allow any specification of centering or assessing the browser width, which would be an avenue to centering. Again, it's another part of the grammar that shows promise as a solution, but, because it is a hack, almost provides more problems than it solves. So far we have had this discussion about four times _this year_. Nobody has been able to come up with good reason , other than semantic purity, why we shouldn't just have simple and effective tools to answer these problems. Whilst semantic purity is a nice thing, the only language that is ever going to be pure is one that is not in use. If you want to get things done, you need to bend the rules and CSS should be more concerned with providing features than of being a good example to language authors. That's one of the reasons HTML is so useful. It's a tool, it gets the job done. Ben (q) Ben Godfrey? (a) Web Developer and Designer See http://aftnn.org/ for details
Received on Thursday, 3 July 2003 12:32:16 UTC