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Re: Re: Is it time to rely on CSS? -- Yes


Elliot Rusty Harold replies to Adam di Carlo's

>>>>>>>>>>

>Even if Netscape 4 didn't support CSS1, why should we sacrifice the
>convenience of style formatting for 95% of the authors/users because
>of the bugginess of the 5% ?  Anyhow, even if the 5% can't see the
>style, surely the document would still be legible to them.

<<<<<<<<<<

with:

>>>>>

I'm not willing to throw away 5% of readers to satisfy some
ideological notion of HTML purity. I will only move forward to new
technologies when they are truly ubiquitous or provide features I
need that are simply not available using the old techniques. CSS
doesn't meet that criteria. It doesn't help me do anything I need to
do with my DocBook books I can't do with plain HTML.

<<<<<

I am most certainly willing to sacrifice that 5%.

Okay, "sacrifice" is too strong a word, here. Let's say "discomfit." We're
talking about stylesheets, not content. True, the loss of highlighting and
other stylistic signals often represents a loss of information, but that
already happens to a sizable degree when we attempt to display tables and
images on Netscape 4.X and earlier browsers. The loss is manageable,
survivable, and--in my opinion--acceptable. If your clients complain about
the look of the documents, explain that your documents are optimized for
W3C-compliant browsers and, maybe, offer an alternate output (PDF, for
instance). Compromising with downlevel technology provides a cozy
disincentive to upgrading.

The big problem I see with going to CSS is that it's just one more task,
one more fiddly bit I have to tweak, one more requirement I have to get my
writers to include in order to make their documents look good. Ah well,
such is the world of modern technology:  we move with the flow of traffic,
or we let it run us over. So, despite my personal comfort level with the
current state of DocBook-produced HTML documents, I believe DocBook should
evolve to be producing HTML 4.1 documents with CSS2 stylesheets (separate
stylesheets, not a stylesheet coded into the html document) for the
broadest range and finest control of customization.  CSS2 and HTML 4.1 are
the standards that all browser developers should now be working toward. We
should be working to reach and promote that same standard.

Dennis Grace

Information Developer
IBM Linux Technology Center
(512) 838-3937  T/L 678-3937  cell: (512)-296-7830
dgrace@us.ibm.com

There are only 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary
and those who don't.



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