davidkin hollywood

Wednesday, February 20, 2002

"Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher." – Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Terre des Hommes (Perfection is attained not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away) Odd that this CSS discussion came up just as I was reading one of my favorite authors. Bruce Tognazzini also has similar thoughts: "Eliminate any element of the application that is not helping. Be ruthless."
comment 4:12:29 PM    

And another thing... AvantGo would have no business if designers wrote valid HTML and put their appearance information in a stylesheet.
comment 3:56:13 PM    

CSS or Dogma 2000? CSS itself isn't a philosophy, it's just a tool or a method. You can use CSS just as improperly as HTML 3.2 -- just look at early CSS demos (I think I remember some hosted at Microsoft showing off capabilities of IE 4) where people were getting drop shadow effects by having identical <span>s of text lain on top of one another. That's not the way to do it either. The "philosophy," if it can be called such is simply this: Don't make the content dependent on the medium. Note that some content is completely incompatible with this philosophy, and there's nothing wrong with that. Moving pictures are content, but they have little meaning in a medium like a TDD device, a telephone, or a postal letter. To the extent that most of the web is words and pictures (especially weblogs, news outlets, etc.) this philosophy finds a comfortable home. Words find their home in almost every medium from papyrus to web browser. Let the writer work on the words and the designer work on the layout. Not only does this ensure that many different types of media can digest the same content, it also means that (given suitable and so far near-imaginary CSS support in a number of devices and portals) a designer can come up with as many designs as needed without worrying about where the content goes. The stylesheet takes care of it. Obvious present-day problem web platforms such as WebTV, cell phones, and handhelds would not be nearly the headache they are now if HTML wasn't so forked up with <font> tags and deeply-nested, hard-width tables. I believe that much of the difficulty that people experience with CSS is in trying to do what they've been doing with tables, which in turn was a way for people to try to do in a web browser what they could do in PageMaker. The web is a different medium, and people are still getting over the print thing.
comment 3:50:36 PM