RE: Stylings only possible with Tables

David Woolley wrote:
> In the original intended use of HTML, which 
> corresponds to white papers, user guides, and internal documents, not to 
> the glossy brochures that most web sites try to emulate,one wants to be 
> able to write simple and compact style sheets that will result in 
> correctly marked up text being rendered according to reasonably good 
> typographical practice.

And it's because this intent lives on that we face all the discussed
limitations in CSS. I think a lot of people reasoning like this will need
to open their eyes and realize that the web has changed, and will have to
evolve to face new challenges.

> The demand for sophisticated layouts comes from people writing the 
> equivalent of glossy brochures, a rather different problem area.  Tools 
> for doing sophisticated but fixed layout, designs for these pre-date the 
> web; HTML made a very deliberate choice not to emulate them.

I work mainly with web applications and regularly face problems with 
things like flexible form layout as CSS has a too limited instruction set
for this. Getting the job done while adhering to web standards and using 
semantic markup certainly isn't an easy task...
So this problem domain isn't trying to mimic glossy broschures but rather
application GUIs.

Or maybe HTML/CSS purists think applications don't belong in their
technologies, and we should all move away to Flash? This topic is 
discussed in other foras, such as
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2007/03/the_open_web_and_its
_adversari.html
I would rather see that we make an effort to stay with the open web.

Maybe what is needed is a CSS effort corresponding to the Web 
Applications 1.0 / HTML5 initiative?

Best regards
Mike Wilson

Received on Friday, 29 June 2007 09:07:20 UTC