At 04:14 PM 5/18/2006, Peter Ottery wrote:
2) after i added the same amount of margin to each side of an element
in the visual view, i switched to code view and it had written....
{margin-top: 20px; margin-right: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px;
margin-left: 20px;}
instead of ....
{margin: 20px}
....so until they get that sort of thing sorted it seems to have some
pretty basic but fundamental shortcomings in constructing css.
I don't consider a lack of shorthand optimization to be a fatal
flaw. I don't often use shorthand properties in my own stylesheets,
usually because I don't intend to specify all dimensions, preferring
to stipulate the minimum necessary, and also because I often find it
preferable to spell out individual properties for the sake of
readability & searchability.
My experience with Microsoft's "helpful" software is not a glad one,
and I have come to turn off most of their second-guessing
routines. To be candid, I should confess that I feel somewhat
threatened by the introduction of a high-quality web page editor and
am not overly eager for it to succeed even while I might
intellectually celebrate its cleverness. For my own sake, I want
there to continue to be a need for human web crafters. Does that
make me merely the latest species of dinosaur?
How would we want optimization to work, exactly? The example you
cite, in which all (four) properties of a property group were
specified, has got to be an exceptional circumstance. I rarely
specify all the properties in a group in my hand-coded
stylesheets. If you had explicitly changed only one or two of the
group's properties, surely you wouldn't want the software to output a
shorthand code. To do so the software would have to assume that the
unchanged properties had a zero value, whereas you may have intended
them to be unspecified, perhaps to inherit from an ancestor or to
give way to an earlier rule of weaker specificity.
I think that would be one of the greatest challenges of writing a
decent WYSIWYG web page editor: how to differentiate between
properties intended to have "zero" value from properties intended to
be unspecified. If Microsoft's new widget made CSS minimalism hard
to achieve, I'd not be inclined to use or recommend it.
Regards,
Paul
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