TD CSS Shorthands... Thoughts?

On Sat, 29 Apr 2006, phil-news-nospam (AT) ipal (DOT) net wrote:

In comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets Alan J. Flavell
flavell (AT) physics (DOT) gla.ac.uk> wrote:

| Oh, sure: long-winded HTML (i.e in this case with a class= on every
| damned table cell) is also no problem to anyone who can write a
| program to spew it out. But it's more a matter of taking a little
| pride in what one extrudes out onto the world wild web - - and I'm
| sure you really feel that way yourself, despite your occasional
| remarks that might be interpreted to suggest otherwise :-}

I'd rather put the class on the TABLE element just once instead of
having it on each and every TD element.

This thread seems to have lost its way. I was following-up to a
suggestion about marking rows or columns as "odd" or "even" so that
they could be styled distinctively. You can't do that by merely
sticking a class on the whole table.

You /could/ do it by putting a class on every cell[1]. /Or/ you could
do it (in supporting browsers) by use of selectors like td+td,
td+td+td etc. as I already showed.

Of course if each _column_ in a multi column table needs to be
styled in a slightly different way, that gets harder. I saw some
things that looked like it could still be handled by specifying
instance numbers in CSS.

Do you have a cite for that?


[1] or just on alternate cells, if you don't mind being unsymmetrical.

On Sat, 29 Apr 2006, Tony wrote:

Alan J. Flavell wrote:
You're showing no indication of listening. In particular to the
principle of separation of content from presentation, as designed
into the HTML/CSS design.

I am fully aware of the separation of content & presentation.

You're not showing it much...

However it seems that you are not very aware of some of the
practical implications of working with a large team of coders.

Out here we aren't tied-down by the shortcomings of your internal
process: we're more interested in the quality of what you finally
extrude onto the web. If that's at variance with the underlying
principles, then I'd say we'd have every right to comment on that, no
matter that you attempt to set your own incompatible criteria.

And if you store that class declaration as a constant, then all
you have to do is change that single constant to change the way
the site renders.

uh-uh, so next week you'd be happy to code stuff like:

.r { text-align: center; }

and
.blue { color: yellow; }

Seems that you're the one not listening. If the change were to be
made, it would be made on the server side, by changing a constant
definition so that it would render as class="c" or class="yellow"

You pretty-much make my point for me. It looks as if you really don't
understand that you have put the presentation (which should be
basically in the stylesheet) right back into the content (HTML),
thereby causing you to rewrite all the web pages in order to make
changes to the stylesheet. This has all kinds of consequences in
terms of cacheability, stability relative to web indexing services,
and so on. Quite apart from being apparently predicated on the
assumption that there would be only one valid presentation in effect
at any given time.

If this is what your internal process has led you to do, I say you
would be advised to review your internal process. Andy D has made the
point rather more emphatically, but the meaning is, I think, much the
same.

In comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets Alan J. Flavell <flavell (AT) physics (DOT) gla.ac.uk> wrote:

On Sat, 29 Apr 2006, phil-news-nospam (AT) ipal (DOT) net wrote:

In comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets Alan J. Flavell
flavell (AT) physics (DOT) gla.ac.uk> wrote:

| Oh, sure: long-winded HTML (i.e in this case with a class= on every
| damned table cell) is also no problem to anyone who can write a
| program to spew it out. But it's more a matter of taking a little
| pride in what one extrudes out onto the world wild web - - and I'm
| sure you really feel that way yourself, despite your occasional
| remarks that might be interpreted to suggest otherwise :-}

I'd rather put the class on the TABLE element just once instead of
having it on each and every TD element.

This thread seems to have lost its way. I was following-up to a
suggestion about marking rows or columns as "odd" or "even" so that
they could be styled distinctively. You can't do that by merely
sticking a class on the whole table.

It might be doable if CSS had :even and dd selectors which worked in
a way similar to :first-child. Getting the next row to reverse that
sense would be an extra set of selectors based on both row and column
selections.

So maybe someone will add this to CSS3?

It might also help if they go the whole way and allow arithmetic
expressions in selectors to select which instance of child to be
matched with that selector.

I could also argue that certain things, like the colors of a Chess board,
are content, not style.

--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Phil Howard KA9WGN | http://linuxhomepage.com/ http://ham.org/ |
(first name) at ipal.net | http://phil.ipal.org/ http://ka9wgn.ham.org/ |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

phil-news-nospam (AT) ipal (DOT) net writes:

I could also argue that certain things, like the colors of a Chess board,
are content, not style.

You could argue, but you couldn't make a point. Squares on a chess
board are identified by the number of the row and the letter of the
column. Their colors are totally irrelevant even for a beginner.

What needs to be identified on an abstract level is the player at move
(counting from one, neither white nor nil and the initial and new
alphanumeric position of the piece. Shapes, colors and even names are
but e(ye|ar) candy; that's why good players can play without the
hardware in the first place.

Even if you want to represent just one frame of a match, the real
information is still provided by the position of the pieces, and the
conventional assignment to 'white' and 'black' has seldomly any
resemblance with colors of a nice physical wooden edition, has it?

It's just the same with markup and style sheets. You have information,
and you have supporting representation (admittedly, HTML is very poor at
its descriptive value).


--

|| hexadecimal EBB
o-o decimal 3771

--oOo--( )--oOo-- octal 7273
205 goodbye binary 111010111011

Adrienne Boswell wrote:

That's not the point of CSS. The programmers should not be involved
with the client side stuff at all. All they should be doing is the
server side stuff that generates the HTML that the stylesheet decorates,
and javascript (if applicable) enhances.

I agree in principle. In practice, the fact that I have to provide HTML,
javascript & CSS to five developers, all on a deadline, means that I
can't always stop what I'm doing to provide them with new classes for
something they're working on, without holding someone up (and causing
them to miss deadlines). So I provide convenient shorthands for those times.

I PREFER to use CSS in the proper manner, but classroom theory doesn't
always hold up when it meets with real-world pressures.

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

On Sat, 29 Apr 2006, Tony wrote:


Alan J. Flavell wrote:

You're showing no indication of listening. In particular to the
principle of separation of content from presentation, as designed
into the HTML/CSS design.

I am fully aware of the separation of content & presentation.

You're not showing it much...


However it seems that you are not very aware of some of the
practical implications of working with a large team of coders.

Out here we aren't tied-down by the shortcomings of your internal
process:

And you made my point rather well with that statement.

Sun, 30 Apr 2006 21:31:33 +0200 from Eric B. Bednarz <bednarz@fahr-
zur-hoelle.org>:

phil-news-nospam (AT) ipal (DOT) net writes:

I could also argue that certain things, like the colors of a Chess board,
are content, not style.

You could argue, but you couldn't make a point. Squares on a chess
board are identified by the number of the row and the letter of the
column. Their colors are totally irrelevant even for a beginner.

Oh? What about "the queen starts on her own color" and "a bishop
always stays on its own color"?

Yes, it's _possible_ to frame those rules in different ways, but the
use of color is the most natural.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2.1 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Why We Won't Help You:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/200..._wont_help_you

In comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets Tony <tony23 (AT) dslextreme (DOT) whatisthis.com> wrote:

Adrienne Boswell wrote:

That's not the point of CSS. The programmers should not be involved
with the client side stuff at all. All they should be doing is the
server side stuff that generates the HTML that the stylesheet decorates,
and javascript (if applicable) enhances.

I agree in principle. In practice, the fact that I have to provide HTML,
javascript & CSS to five developers, all on a deadline, means that I
can't always stop what I'm doing to provide them with new classes for
something they're working on, without holding someone up (and causing
them to miss deadlines). So I provide convenient shorthands for those times.

I PREFER to use CSS in the proper manner, but classroom theory doesn't
always hold up when it meets with real-world pressures.

And cross-over skills can mean that your best Javascript people could well
be your programmers.

--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Phil Howard KA9WGN | http://linuxhomepage.com/ http://ham.org/ |
(first name) at ipal.net | http://phil.ipal.org/ http://ka9wgn.ham.org/ |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

In comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets Stan Brown <the_stan_brown (AT) fastmail (DOT) fm> wrote:

Sun, 30 Apr 2006 21:31:33 +0200 from Eric B. Bednarz <bednarz@fahr-
zur-hoelle.org>:
phil-news-nospam (AT) ipal (DOT) net writes:

I could also argue that certain things, like the colors of a Chess board,
are content, not style.

You could argue, but you couldn't make a point. Squares on a chess
board are identified by the number of the row and the letter of the
column. Their colors are totally irrelevant even for a beginner.

Oh? What about "the queen starts on her own color" and "a bishop
always stays on its own color"?

He has funny colored pieces?

He's probably matching lightest board color to lightest piece color
and such.

--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Phil Howard KA9WGN | http://linuxhomepage.com/ http://ham.org/ |
(first name) at ipal.net | http://phil.ipal.org/ http://ka9wgn.ham.org/ |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Stan Brown wrote:

Sun, 30 Apr 2006 21:31:33 +0200 from Eric B. Bednarz <bednarz@fahr-
zur-hoelle.org>:

phil-news-nospam (AT) ipal (DOT) net writes:


I could also argue that certain things, like the colors of a Chess board,
are content, not style.

You could argue, but you couldn't make a point. Squares on a chess
board are identified by the number of the row and the letter of the
column. Their colors are totally irrelevant even for a beginner.


Oh? What about "the queen starts on her own color" and "a bishop
always stays on its own color"?

"white on right"?

Yes, it's _possible_ to frame those rules in different ways, but the
use of color is the most natural.