- From: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2004 10:42:09 +0100 (BST)
- To: www-style@w3.org
> How is this worse than list-style-image? Or is it? Almost nobody uses list style image, they put the image into the HTML (and don't use list elements)! The problem, especially, if you do not enforce a restriction to generated content, is that most page designers treat HTML, CSS and DOM and EcmaScript as a single language and will mix and match features from all of them to achieve their intended visual and behavioural result, so if CSS generated images allows a certain hack, they will use them, even if they image is real content. They already use CSS background images as real content, to construct fancy controls[1], and it is standard practice to use content to achieve purely presentational effects. Most images in web pages aren't actually content, but styling (e.g. the famous spacer.gif, but also fancy rules, etc.; even apparent content may really be purely for mood, just like the choice of colour). The question, therefore, is what tradeoff between real content images in CSS as against styling images in content will result, when real authors get involved; presumably with real content in CSS getting a higher penalty that styling masquerading as HTML content. This actually comes down to the "complexity" thread, running on www-html; the more features you add, the more ways there are of abusing them. However, only when real world authors are let loose will you find out which ones are really abused. [1] The site that originally caused me problems with this - the hot spot in the HTML only aligned with the right part of the image in IE - not in Mozilla, seems to have cleaned up its act on this one, though.
Received on Monday, 12 April 2004 05:59:42 UTC