- From: Orion Adrian <orion.adrian@gmail.com>
- Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 22:43:37 -0400
- To: www-style@w3.org
On 9/14/05, David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk> wrote: > > > Or mine which is make CSS a client-side technology only and > > standardize better data specs which, of course, is very unpopular > > here. > > This isn't going to happen. Mosaic used to allow the user to control > the styling of headings. One of the first things that the original > Netscape browser did was to remove that capability. That's almost > certainly because they saw the money as coming from authors, not users. How did that strategy fair for them in the end? Netscape and IE developed a platform for web-based totally interpretted applications. Markup based applications are a neat idea and I'm glad that Microsoft is using markup again for XAML. However, I do feel that the money for browser makers isn't in the authors. They authors don't buy the browsers. It's in the user who might (at least in Opera's case or in IE's case). Where does RSS fit in your worldview? What is it an example of? I see it as a, hey, it's much easier to specify the content and just let the reader take care of the rest. The end result is dozens of RSS readers out there in the market. Now most of them use web plugins to aid in the process, but I feel that those could be replaced with simple GUI widgets and in some cases they are. RSS has succeeded where HTML has failed in many respects. It states fundamentally that the page metaphor while nice and all, isn't what people really want. RSS takes into account how people read and search for information and I feel that's the primary reason it's done so well in such little time. I also feel that it's this effect that Microsoft is latching onto and trying to expand upon. RSS differs in two major facets. One it removes all styling and javascript making it suitable for pretty much anywhere even phones and PDAs. Secondly it attaches meta data to the document that makes it easier to manipulate and understand by those clients. For example it identifies the title, the abstract and the body in such a way, in such a consistent way, that applications can make use of this information. Currently only page titles and certain pieces of metadata in HTML documents are so well defined and in those cases browsers often do something with it (like the title or keywords). So I say that a new model is already upon us. I say that it's time we took a look and see why so many people are starting to prefer RSS over standard HTML feeds and in that view I find we'll see that client side CSS and Javascript isn't a good solution. -- Orion Adrian
Received on Thursday, 15 September 2005 02:43:45 UTC