Re: Center DIV

David, you snipped and ignored the most important part of my question - what group of people was 
adversely affected by the "degeneration" of standards?

I, too, feel aesthetic displeasure when I see seemingly unnecessary things bolted onto a standard - 
but that's my problem.  If the standard is appropriately segmented into levels of compliance and 
feature sets, as CSS is, then it's still possible to use it the simple way, and my aesthetic 
displeasure is the only casualty :)

HTML, DOM and CSS - collectively DHTML - *is* a graphics library and increasingly, some of the most 
popular sites on the web use DHTML, and dozens of products are shipping with web-based interfaces 
that use DHTML.

Many of the facilities that people need in order to use DHTML to build applications don't make sense 
in a paged medium, break incremental rendering, and break automatic processing - and that's OK.  Not 
everything on the web has to conform to those requirements.

Notice that people are using DHTML despite the fact that it is still *excruciatingly difficult* to do 
anything sophisticated.  If you ignore this usage of the web, it's not going to go away.  It's just 
going to continue to be excruciating :)  And here we have an actual group of people being adversely 
affected by what happens to a standard.

So, everybody, please bear this usage of CSS in mind, and please stop shooting things down on the 
basis that they don't fit into the concept of a media-independant document.  All we have to do is 
label features appropriately and UA implementers and competent designers will not be confused. People 
will continue to be able to create media-independent documents with CSS, *if and when* that's what 
they are trying to do.


David Woolley wrote:
[history of technology churn]

Received on Monday, 7 July 2003 02:20:59 UTC