On Sep 8, 2005, at 2:20 PM, Rimantas Liubertas wrote:
Eschewing markup that is not needed today is equivalent to
adding presentational decisions to the markup for tomorrow.
Only if tomorrow we won't have browsers with advanced CSS support
(talk
multiple backgrounds).
I think my point was missed. Treating tags as hooks on which to hang
your design implies that if you want hooks for all possible designs
(e.g., you are separating presentation from your markup), then you
need to add a lot of hooks that are not needed for *this* design.
For example, CSS3 has a means to move content from one area to
another -- not positioning, in layout terms, nor moved in the DOM
tree, but moved in the document flow. For example you can duplicate
all the headings in your document (h1:before { content:contents; }),
and place the duplicates up front in a table of contents that the
rest of the document recognizes as being in the flow. Or footnotes
can be inline, right next to the content they refer to, but then
placed last in the document, one after the other, with self-numbering
precursors like an ordered list.
But how can you use this future technique of CSS to present your
existing document differently if you didn't put in some empty (and
currently worthless) hooks in the first place? Therefore, by *not*
putting those hooks in, are you essentially making presentation
decisions?
Even though I'd like to see if someone picks this idea up and can
help argue the for/against, because I think it's a worthwhile
discussion, I don't think that reality will play nicely with the
idealized end result of this line of thinking. I think it's far more
likely that people will continue to adopt XML-compatible XHTML-like
documents, which then they can convert in the future via XSLT to have
the markup-based hooks needed for future presentational concerns. In
essence, I think I believe that separating presentation from markup
is ultimately unachievable in the purest sense of totality, but the
consequence of striving to achieve it is a Good Thing(tm).
--
Ben Curtis : webwright
bivia : a personal web studio
http://www.bivia.com
v: (818) 507-6613
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