titaniumdecoy

As I understand it, DaWei's argument is that the most fundamental subset of design should be determined by the author, not the editor. To use your example, cscgal, if I use the [b] bbcode tag in a post on this forum, I can reasonably assume that the text it is applied to will be displayed in bold, not as bright purple underlined text.

cscgal

> cscgal, if I use the [b] bbcode tag in a post on this forum, I can reasonably assume that the text it is applied to will be displayed in bold, not as bright purple underlined text.

Well that's because, as far as I'm concerned, the vBulletin forum system's bbcode is based on the depreciated <b> tag. I don't necessarily agree with that as <b> has been depreciated (and won't validate as valid XHTML) by the W3C in favor of <strong> which simply implies emphasis. It's up to the designer how that emphasis is to be displayed.

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titaniumdecoy

That's exactly it. Is it up to the author or the editor to determine whether text in <strong> tags should be bold or something else entirely? You can argue both sides; in the end it comes down to your definition of content.

lectricpharaoh

Semi-OT: Why do people in this thread seem to confuse 'deprecated' and 'depreciated'? It's a minor nit, and had I just seen it once, I'd have ignored it, but it's starting to grate on me in much the same manner as I was annoyed by a teacher a few semesters back who kept saying 'ek cetera' instead of 'et cetera'.

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cscgal

According to the W3C, 'em' indicates emphasis while 'strong' indicates stronger emphasis. "The presentation of phrase elements depends on the user agent." It does go on to say that "Generally, visual user agents present EM text in italics and STRONG text in bold font." However, the W3C says exactly what I say - that <em> and <strong> tags signify emphasis, but it's up to a CSS file to define how that emphasis is visually displayed.

Guilty. Will be careful from now on.

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cscgal

Sorry, I seem to have skipped over your post and didn't see it until just now. After all the years I've spent in the publishing industry, and all of the dealings I've had working with professional staff writers who write for magazines fulltime, I'm just going to have to agree to disagree on this one.

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Dameon

Quite the opposite. My point is that CSS makes doing so near impossible.

That holds true only in an example as simple as the one given. That's my point. To be clear, for the purposes of my argument, I define 'content' as including its structure, XHTML tags in your example. When you add a div tag for the sole purpose of aesthetics, one which is otherwise unrelated to the content, CSS has failed. The same goes for reordering elements so things float around correctly or are otherwise easier to arrange. We are both well aware that this is often the case.

I use XSLT to get somewhat closer to the ideal. The page content will consist of tags such as <page> (perhaps with a 'name' attribute), <section>, <menu>, and <userinfo>. The structure of the source document could match up with the resulting XHTML doctree, but this is not a requirement. I may have a sidebar <div> with contents pulled from a separate document, using an XPath expression such as document('/navmenu.xml')/menu. The menu tag would have an associated template that would result in a <ul> element, but each menu item could just as well have additional attributes. The menu may expand only to show the parent items of the current /page/@name. Should this item be displayed only when the user is logged in? Check /page/user/@loginstate. Perhaps you want to arrange books by author, but the data is unordered. XHTML and CSS will come in to play at some point, yes. Combined, they are barely sufficient for page design -- at least this way, all of the XHTML and CSS hacks needed to make things pretty are entirely separate from what ever data source the content is coming from. Just give the client potentially useful information such that it can be processed appropriately. Not some prettified page/data bastard child.

Which was only my last point. Idealistic notions of clean design aside, CSS still comes in to play for layout at some point even in my above example. Surely there exists a better way to define page layout. My suggestion in the original post, close to human perceptions and way of thinking about layout it may be, is only one example.

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cscgal

Are you referring to throwing excess <div> tags into your markup which serve no contextual purpose other than to serve as hooks for your CSS file?

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MiKuS

As it stands styling with CSS is good, positioning (everything to do with the box model) is cactus, simple. I expect to see javascript toolkits like prototype and jquery that are built specifically to correct cross browser (in)consistency issues, we're already starting to see CSS frameworks which make designing cross browser layouts a lot easier, for example:

http://www.yaml.de/
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/grids/
http://code.google.com/p/blueprintcss/

soon you will not be writing your css to work in a certain browser, then applying hacks where needed you will be coding your site for a javascript framework which will return browser specific code, depending on the user agent.

What are everyones thoughts on this?

DaWei

What if one doesn't want to require one's viewers to use Javascript?

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