Re: [CSS21] Addition of 2 values to the visibility property

Ph. Wittenbergh wrote:

> through casual surfing, or via questions raised on mailing lists such as 
 > CSS-D), I'd say: the content property would cover most of them.

I'd say that the content property so clearly matches the real intent 
that if it misses cases, they should be candidates for enhancing 
content, not for supporting hacks based on pretending a background is a 
foreground (incidentally, one distinction between background and 
foreground, is that backgrounds are often suppressed in printing).

> Basically, what people are looking for is replace the text-string in an 
> element with an image, because they want to use a specific font or some 
> effects on the text and other such graphical tricks.
> 
> @font-face will also help solving this problem in more sane ways.

My feeling is that this won't happen.  If it was going to happen it 
would have happened with EOT fonts.  I think, once people had started 
using image replacement, the cat was out of the bag and any font based 
approach will be seen as less flexible than a fully controllable bitmap.
My impression is that PDF is moving to have more and more bitmap 
imagery, even though it is a vector format with font embedding.  In this 
specific case, people will simply prepare Word Art(TM) and embed it, not 
knowing or caring that it is a bitmap format.

It is just possible that if Netscape 1 had had embedded fonts, people 
would not have used so much image replacement, but I'm doubtful if even 
that would have been true, as the design imperative is to continually do 
something different.



-- 
David Woolley
Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want.
RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.

Received on Sunday, 6 July 2008 09:48:29 UTC