Re: The CSS Problem

Jens O. Meiert wrote:

> Authors scream “more, more” and we seem to happily deliver. At the
> same time do authors demonstrate that they don’t even understand the

I think that is because most authors are visually oriented people who 
have not really bought into the fundamental principles that:

- structure should be separated from style;
- but style should also reflect structure.

They are interested in how to achieve a particular effect.  It is much 
easier for them to make everything an ID reference, or to use classes 
based on presentation, than to look at the structure of the document, 
describe it well, and come up with a true style sheet - a set of rules 
for formatting the standard structures of the document.

(Historically, style sheets were paper documents, probably written by a 
marketing consultant, giving rules for how company textual documents 
should be laid out, and written in structural terms.  They were written 
once for tens of thousands of documents.  Now they are just the 
separated presentational information for one off documents.)

-- 
David Woolley
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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 Tuesday, 13 November 2012 23:19:17 UTC