Using CSS in page layout and design

Chris Tomlinson wrote:

I wonder, do you know of any converters either available now or in
development, that will take current HTML code, and convert (find & replace
basically) the appropriate tags, for CSS placed in the header?

Guys, it is a honnor to see c.l.j. as a place to discuss burning
questions of any web-related kinds. Still all this thread would be much
better suited for say <comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets>


Not a Usenet cop, just curious trespasser.

VK <schools_ring (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> scripsit:

Chris Tomlinson wrote:
I wonder, do you know of any converters either available now or in
development, that will take current HTML code, and convert (find &
replace basically) the appropriate tags, for CSS placed in the
header?

There can be no such converter, or at least you would need to define quite a
lot of specific conversion rules. Presentational HTML features have largely
been defined somewhat vaguely and generally with no specific mapping to CSS.
To take the classical example, there is no defined relationship between
<font size="2"> and the values of font-size in CSS, though in practice, you
could decide to try to deal with the issue the same way as most browsers.
More strikingly, if a page uses <blockquote>, how could the conversion
routine know whether the markup should be retained (because it is logical
markup) or replaced by <div> markup and some CSS rule with margin-left? If
you try to replace <font color="..."> by something, you can rather easily
enter suitable CSS code for the exact replacement, but this means violating
the basic CSS design principle of always setting background when you set
color, and vice versa. Selecting a background is probably not automatable
before we make computers think.

As a rule, HTML markup that contains lots of presentational markup is
usually not worth converting to anything. It should be rewritten. Exceptions
include data generated by automated conversion routines from, say, Word or
PDF format. But even then, what really needs to be done is to get rid of all
or most of the presentational stuff, then start thinking about styling it,
from a clean desk.

Guys, it is a honnor to see c.l.j. as a place to discuss burning
questions of any web-related kinds. Still all this thread would be
much better suited for say
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets

Sounds plausible, from the quoted text, but I'm not going to read the
thread; I just comment on the question that was asked (and that looked
rather self-contained and clear, though unfortunately with an unclear
answer).

P.S. When adding a group to the Newsgroups line and suggesting verbally that
discussion continue there, you should also set the Followup-To header
correspondingly.