Re: CSS Futures

James Elmore wrote:

> that the ability to display data (lists, tables, 3-D data sets, graphs 

>     Some documents, like coupons, should not be displayed before / after 
> certain times. Some document information might be more or less important 
> (displayed larger or smaller) based on time of day or day of week -- ads 
> for nightclubs or breakfast bars, for instance. Documents in general 
> should use larger fonts at night, for easier reading.

One of the key design principles of HTML is that it provides basic
capabilities that allow one to produce usable documents for many 
purposes without having to learn and understand a complex language (the 
amount of copy and paste coding that goes on indicates that even even 
professional web designers can't handle complex language rules).  3-D 
data sets seems to me to be a specialist use, and the other paragraph 
quoted appears to me to require a specialist advertising language.

Rather than trying to bolt on features to support specialist uses, users 
should be first checking to make sure that there isn't a less 
fashionable tool that is designed for the application, and then create a 
language that is optimised for that application.

> 
>     Some consideration has already been given to the length of time 
> media objects are displayed, using SMIL. Can SMIL or SMIL-like syntax be 
> applied to styles, to make text (or objects in general) expand and/or 
> move? This would allow CSS (and possibly XHTML) to eliminate <marquee> 

If you are staying within W3C technologies, I would suggest that this 
would be an SVG application, as I very much doubt that the average 
author of such documents will care about accessibility.

Incidentally, marquee is an accessibility no-no, because it is 
distracting and it is difficult for slow readers (including not native 
language) to read.  That is why it wasn't retained as a presentational 
element in HTML.

-- 
David Woolley
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Received on Tuesday, 3 July 2007 07:07:35 UTC