Anne van Kesteren wrote:
Quoting Lachlan Hunt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
No it doesn't. Neither of them make any sense at all. If I've
understood this thread well enough, the whole concept behind it means
to take this element out of the normal flow and do some magic to
display it somewhere appropriate in the chrome of the browser. e.g.
in a menu for <link>, the title bar for <title>, the status bar (or
wherever) for something else. Who knows what on earth would happen
with this applied to an HTML document?
* { display: meta; }
CSS is the wrong layer to handle this. AIUI, I believe the binding
layer (XBL) is the correct layer for it.
I agree that CSS is the wrong layer. XBL doesn't really solve this
though as it
doesn't affect the semantics of the document. It merely adds some kind of
"pseudo-dom" to the node it is bound to (that doesn't affect the
semantics of
that node nor of the document the node is in).
However, I'm still not sure what problem is being solved here.
If I understood correctly, the problem that is being solved is loosely
"websites all look different and so are hard to navigate". Am I correct?
Assuming I am, the idea of display:meta or any other similar solution is
doomed to fail for the same reasons that <link> has never really taken
off (only the situation with display:meta would be much worse because it
applies to all elements):
1. It doesn't make sites consistent. Even if we only consider
display:meta being used to create native menus from navigation lists,
each site would still have totally different items in a totally
different order. In desktop applications, the consistency comes not so
much from the fact that all menu bars look the same and appear in the
same place (though that is important) but from the fact that it is
possible to guess which items will be in which popup and what the
function of each item will be (e.g. the Edit menu will _always_ start
Undo, Redo, Cut, Copy, Paste... assuming those actions are supported by
the application). On the web, there is inherently no such consistency
(websites don't have nearly the same consistency of actions that desktop
apps have) and it's hard to imagine a Web equivalent to Desktop UI
Guidelines to bully site authors into providing a consistent menu stucture.
2. It violates the mental separation between browser and site. My
experience when using the firefox link toolbar is that, even on the rare
occasions where it was populated with useful entries _at_all_ I was more
likely to use the on site navigation controls, simply because I wasn't
looking in the browser chrome for a site-specific control. I guess many
people would experience the same problem.
3. Of course point 2 wouldn't be a problem if this was used to
pervasively and consistently (but see point 1) that everyone got used to
looking in the browser chrome for site-specific functionality. But in
the meantime, why would a significant fraction of authors use a style
rule that, for all that people would notice it, might as well be named
display:really-well-hidden? And if no authors use it, no one will learn
to look for it and... well you see its a problem that was discussed a
long time ago.
Of course I may have missed the point entirely. I don't claim to have
read every word in the thread.
