of a series of thoughts. How it is respresented visually can be
accomplished via CSS. I can indent a <p>. I can make margins or padding
bigger or smaller. Heck, I can even place a paragraph above another one
using CSS. Every user agent has its own style sheet as it were to affect a
presentational representation. User Agents that are aural (ie, screen
readers, will bring a small pause at the end of a sentence (as denoted by a
period) and a slightly longer pause at the end of a paragraph. The semantic
structure of the document is important, but it isn't necessarily
presentational.
Not all agents reading your web page will rely on the visual. Semantic
structure is a growing area. Does your page make sense without style sheets
or any outside visual indicators? There is a HUGE reason for the separation
of content/presentation in this regard.
As for layout grids being under every design. I've seen some way cool
designs at CSS Zen Garden, that mix things up. Right now, for the most
part, we are still totally in a mind set that our web pages must mimic
print. 3 column layouts with a header and footer are newspaper/magazine
layouts. They don't necessarily mimic a table, they mimic what we are used
to. People are used to something familiar. Heck when television first came
out, there was usually an announcer announcing what the actors were doing
even though people could see it happening. This was from radio, where people
couldn't see what was happening and had to be told.) Same thing.
As to CSS not being able to handle specific things, CSS was never intended
to do one thing, CSS is in use not only for Web Pages, it can be used for
XML, Flash uses CSS for presentation now. If you are going to blame someone
or something for not having style sheets show up the same in different
browsers, blame the browser makers. I'm trying to create a class on CSS
right now, when I get to certain features, I can only show them on specific
browsers (usually Opera). Not because the spec is wrong, but because the
browser makers have not chosen to either implement the spec in its entirety
or accurately. Heck IE6 is the LEAST compliant browser right now and
Microsoft makes NO BONES that it doesn't give a rats' patootie.
http://westciv.typepad.com/dog_or_higher/2004/05/plus_ca_change.html
_____
From: Irvin Gomez
The BIG problem with the theory of "separating logic/content from
presentation" is that you just can't do it! Take the <p> tag, for example.
It neatly separates chunks of information in both a structural AND VISUAL
WAY. How can we deal with that? Besides, most experts are slowly coming to
the conclusion that there's not only no way to separate content from
presentation, there's also no need for it. Presentation is part of the
content, anyway!
Another point frequently missed by "purists" is that every design has an
underlying layout grid, that basically mirrors the behavior/attributes of a
table. Unfortunately, most of the initial CSS proponents didn't have a
design background, so these issues escaped them (that also explains their
ugly websites!). To the point that they ignored the simple fact that CSS is
a concept (down to the name of "stylesheets") derived from print design.
I guess until CSS 3 (or future versions) takes care of these issues, we are
best adviced to go with hybrid layouts, as you point out. But then again,
once that's done, then new issues will crop up: what about text wrapping
around pictures (like the "runaround" feature in Quark Xpresss)?...
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