Re: flowing around both sides of a float

David Woolley wrote:
> James Elmore wrote:
>
>   
>> some of the proposals will be difficult to implement. Also, some will
>> not be immediately used, simply because they are not known to be
>> available. But providing tools which make CSS a more complete system of
>> styling documents will make CSS a more useful tool set.
>>     
>
> One of the things that makes a good computing standard is that it
> achieves a lot with a little.  One of the things that leads to the
> eventual death of computing standards is that whilst they start that
> way, they eventually try to do everything.  As a result they get too
> complex (CSS is already well beyond the point where most authors
> understand it well enough to be able to know whether there are features
> to do things they want).
>   
David:

I don't think that having more features makes CSS more complex
necessarily.  It just makes more features available to choose from,
which is a good thing.  One uses a subset of familiar features and looks
for new ones as new needs arise.  Many of the same developers who use
CSS are also programmers and CSS is nothing compared to that.  The
biggest roadblock in adoption of CSS is not complexity---it's lack of
consistency in browser support, countless implementation bugs and the
need for countless workarounds and hacks.  This is what makes adoption
hard, not complexity, really.  After all, many of the more useful
(complex?) features of CSS 2.1 are impossible to use even now, mostly
because of certain outdated web browser versions 6+1.

I would really love to see CSS become something of a CSS+ECMAScript+SVG
type environment.  This would certainly be complex, but if it's
implemented in a way that allows anyone to bite off as much as one can
chew, the complexity would not get in the way.

Aleksey

-- 
Aleksey V Lazar
Website Developer
http://www.mnsu.edu/