Re: Well done on new devel pages
On Sun, Mar 04, 2001 at 05:31:40PM +0100, Josip Rodin wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 03, 2001 at 10:17:59PM +0100, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> > The trick is that you don't need to support CSS to be able to look at
> > pages using style sheets. If you do it correct, the document is structured
> > as the document should be. Then I can view the page correctly with every
> > html capable browser.
>
> Yes, but you don't see it the same way.
You fundamentally can't see it see the same way. If every presentation
medium would be equal, we would have solved the layout problem years ago.
Abstraction and structurisation are absolutely necessary because these
differences exist.
My text terminal can't display a background image, for example.
Pictures on printed paper can't be animated (would be cool, though :)
Even when two output media both can understand style sheets, you can apply
different styles to them (for example, when being printed, make background
white, not black). A user can even specify his own styles to overwrite
yours.
So yes, your opinion is au contraire to HTML and related standards.
I suspect it can only be satisfied with formats like postscript or dvi
("DeVice Independent").
> > In fact file size is reduced because layout is done once, and imported
> > into all html files with a link.
>
> The viewers with CSS-compliant browsers still get to load those 2.9K... but
> yes, the other ones don't, you're right.
They will only load it once and cash it. Because you are supposed to use the
same style sheet for the whole site, it's much better. Also, you can apply a
whole load of styles with a simple id. In pure HTML (transitional for
example), you have to repeat font and table tags throughout each document.
But I also realize that styles are still problematic. A corporate web site I
wrote using styles worked fine in most browsers, but not in Acro Writer
(what they produced looked suspiciously like what the Netscape 4.0 rendering
engine does), so I changed it back to font tags at all. There are a zillion
of compatibility problems. It's a shame.
Thanks,
Marcus
--
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de
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