TD CSS Shorthands... Thoughts?

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"?

Those are heuristics; the former doesn't state the rule about where on
the board the queen starts, and the latter doesn't state the permitted
moves for a bishop. They are useful (to a novice player, perhaps) in
visualising possible states of the board.

More to the point: the phrase "its own colour" doesn't name any
particular colour. It's a placeholder for a real colour, which one might
imagine being added after the fact, as it were by CSS.

--
Jack.

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

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.

Just to clarify, there is so much of the "web standards" community that
is out of touch with the real world. I remember when people started to
push "web standards" faily heavily a few years ago (no one specific date,
it just came along gradually). At that time, much _more_ could be done
with the HTML tricks people had discovered than stylesheets were capable
of doing with the browsers of the day. And what I mean by browsers of
the day were NOT the ones just released, but rather, the ones that people
were actually using, many of which didn't support CSS at all. Yet tricks
like creating page layouts with every shim and wedge done in horribly
nested tables and transparent GIFs were at least working. All the while
a group of people were preaching the "web standards" religion only so far
as trying to convince developers how important it was, and doing little
or nothing to help actually get things moving to the point where such
"web standards" could be used. Back in those days, the browsers that did
support CSS were crap (example, Netscape 4, which was ... I know because
I benchmarked it ... an average of 22.5 times slower that the previous
Netscape 3 at rendering pages). So the suggestion made by the zealots of
"web standards" to "upgrade your browser" wasn't yet a viable option.
And these very same people refused to pressure the browser developers to
expedite these and other fixes that would make new browsers viable. But
given enough time passing, and new faster CPUs, we have (IMHO) reached a
level where the latest browser is one which I can feel good about urging
people I know to upgrade to ... Firefox 1.5 ... and 1.5.0.3 is now out.

But still, the "web standards" religion continues in the form of lack of
specific help by so many of them. They refuse to answer specific questions
on how to do things, or try to get you to back down on your layout needs
(that would work using the old HTML tricks, but may or may not work in the
latest CSS across a reasonable set of browsers). All they say is you need
to "understand" the principle, and that somehow all will fall into place.
Yet the details are lacking in how they help.

Business is about getting things done, not about promoting some religion.
Making something work, at least reasonably so, in a sufficient number of
browsers that cover the vast majority of (e.g. nearly all) users, is more
important than making the way it was coded fit someone else's idea of what
is correct or elegant.

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

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

Business is about getting things done, not about promoting some
religion. Making something work, at least reasonably so, in a
sufficient number of browsers that cover the vast majority of (e.g.
nearly all) users, is more important than making the way it was coded
fit someone else's idea of what is correct or elegant.

That depends on your POV, actually.

When writing instructions for a computer, it's much easier to code in a
regular language (one that obeys rules) than to express what you want
done precisely using (say) idiomatic French. Similarly, given a regular
language for describing web-pages, it's much easier to describe a page
using that language, than to do it using a language that's riddled with
quirks.

That's assuming that you are starting from zero, of course - that you
have to learn whichever language you decide to use. I'm also assuming
that the page is non-trivial; for a trivial page, it's often easiest to
just guess what the correct HTML would look like, see if it works, and
tweak it if it doesn't. Obviously these assumptions are counterfactuals;
lots of people are already familiar with quirky HTML, and many pages are
in fact trivial.

Given that most of the HTML on the web is written using some language
that is not regular, and this stuff needs maintaining; and given that
there is a large pool of quirks-mode-only coders out there; it follows
that there is a natural resistance to the take-up of the practice of
standards-compliant web-coding. And that resistance means that effort
has to be applied to produce standards-compliant pages. The benefits of
doing this include real business benefits; but in the short term,
standards compliance may appear to be more costly, and therefore less
business-friendly.

That's just an illusion, though; and short-termism in business is
generally considered A Bad Thing.

I've not so far mentioned the biggest (business) benefit of coding using
a regular variant of HTML, which is that the most modern forms of HTML
'harmonise' with XML. Harmonising with XML makes it dramatically easier
to generate pages automatically, and therefore cheaply.

--
Jack.

In comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html Jack <mrdemeanour (AT) nospam (DOT) jackpot.uk.net> wrote:

Given that most of the HTML on the web is written using some language
that is not regular, and this stuff needs maintaining; and given that
there is a large pool of quirks-mode-only coders out there; it follows
that there is a natural resistance to the take-up of the practice of
standards-compliant web-coding. And that resistance means that effort
has to be applied to produce standards-compliant pages. The benefits of
doing this include real business benefits; but in the short term,
standards compliance may appear to be more costly, and therefore less
business-friendly.

And business generally works in the short term, unfortunately. I can
understand the benefits of standards compliance. But compliance needs
more than just web site developers doing so ... it also needs browsers
to comply. If every major browser provider had a fully 100% standards
compliant browser out now, that was not also full of security issues,
performance issues, memory bloat, and bugs, then it would simply be a
matter of urging people to upgrade their browser to the latest version
of the _same_ browser (insted of trying to get them to switch to one
they are not familiar with). If it were that simple, moving on to more
standards compliant web sites would be a lot easier. But in business,
it's about getting the number of eyes seeing your product, not about
having some "behind the scenes code" few people ever see being "just
right". If you lose 5% of your readers/visitors because your site is
ugly or doesn't work in the old browsers lots of people still use, then
your competition, which is tweaking with quirks, can start to outsell
you.

Those who want to promote web standards need to be doing this promotion
most heavily on the browser makers. Having many web sites be strictly
web standards compliant certain is a component of that effort. But do
not expect everyone to do that on their web sites.

That's just an illusion, though; and short-termism in business is
generally considered A Bad Thing.

Nevertheless, business tends to operate that way, mostly because investors
want short term ROI.

I've not so far mentioned the biggest (business) benefit of coding using
a regular variant of HTML, which is that the most modern forms of HTML
'harmonise' with XML. Harmonising with XML makes it dramatically easier
to generate pages automatically, and therefore cheaply.

At much short term cost.

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

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