Re: The Core Beliefs of Usability and Their CSS Application

> How things are cached and managed is unimportant to the existance of

The details of caching are actually pretty important and a large
part of HTTP/1.1 is about them.  It's unlikely that defaults truly
reflect the appropriate values.

> such a feature to the web author. They need only know that it's turned
> on.

Actually, if you look at people's attempts to control caching with
meta elements (often theoretically unsound) you will quickly realise
that designers don't want to know what the caching settings are, they
simply want to force them to no caching at all.

> 
> Actually most that I've seen are in fact fairly complex. They often
> handle server script (PHP, ASP, CGI), they handle page instructions

These are usually conceptually handled by plug-ins, outside of the
core server engine.

> I'm sure that's exactly what the web authors had in mind with
> spacer.gif . The truth I think is that visual designers think in

Although its certainly arguable, I think that weakens your argument
that if browsers had implemented your five zones internally designers
wouldn't have tried to do their own layouts with tables.

> pictures and when asked why all there <p> elements are empty except
> for a src attribute, they're going to say, "that's how you do images

Hopefully, that sort of designer will realise that they should be
using HTML 4.01 Transitional.  Unfortunately, computing now being
a fashion industry, they probably will try and misuse XHTML 2.0

> now." The irony will be bittersweet. I'll be right and won't want to
> be.

Received on Tuesday, 5 July 2005 21:12:18 UTC