🚀 go-pugleaf

On Mon, 20 Jan 1997, Thomas Weigle wrote:

> > People are always asking how to have their background image so that it
> > doesn't tile.  The answer is Cascading Style Sheets, but that won't
> > work on Netscape.
> 
> Netscape has their own answer: 

Nothing new there.  Netscape has a history of tossing the already-
available HTML-friendly designs and introducing their own HTML-hostile
kludges.

> As a matter of fact, style sheets are not easy to learn.

As a matter of fact, on this one point I think you may be right: getting
style sheets right has never been a simple task, and that's just as true
for MS Word and for LaTeX etc. etc. as it is for CSS1.  Let's take a
step back and look at what has happened on the WWW so far. 

There's a very simple markup language called HTML.  Anyone who is
capable of writing anything that's worth reading can learn it in a short
time, and get working with it right away.  Nevertheless, large numbers
of authors prefer point and click tools that take all the decisions away
from them; produce execrable HTML; often misuse the logical tags in the
tacit belief that their presentation is mandated and that the
presentation is more important than the meaning; and mislead the
operator into thinking they are doing WYSIWYG page layout.

Now, for the first time, they really _can_ do WYSIWYG - without
bastardizing HTML.  It will necessarily be WYSINWOG ("not what others
get") since not all browsers will use the style sheet hints, but that's
life on the WWW.  All that it needs is for the _tool_designers_ to
understand what they are doing - no need for the point-and-click authors
to learn style sheet syntax at all.  Then the style sheets can be
generated automatically by the tools.  

Old codger that I am, I wouldn't personally want to work that way, but
what the heck - it's a big world, and tastes differ.  All that I care is
that the WYSIWYG merchants get what they appear to want, _without_
destroying the capability of HTML to produce what I want to produce:
portable textual information, linked, where appropriate, to other media
(i.e the original intention of HTML).

And if the point-and-click authors have no use for the logical markups,
why should I care - it will only improve the standing of my own
documents with the indexers.  They'll get their pages indexed in the
same general department as those whose entry page consists solely of a
server-side imagemap... 

> > What are your needs, and in what way are they not fulfilled by HTML
> > 3.2 and Cascading Style Sheets?
> 
> Layers, to begin with.

"Layers" is not a "need", it's a solution; but what _problem_ is it
that you are trying to solve with it?

> True multimedia. 

RFC1437, I guess?  Already supported by HTML, of course, even if it
isn't actually supported by any browsers yet (the teleportation bit,
in particular ;-)

Why _does_ the discussion always lurch off down this blind alley?
Other media certainly have their honourable place on the WWW, for
those readers who have the ability to participate, and HTML already
links to them (and will do even better when <OBJECT> is deployed).

There is, nevertheless, even in this post-literate world, a place for
textual information available to _all_ readers: naturally it should be
displayed beautifully on those platforms capable of displaying it
beautifully, but not at the cost of making it inaccessible to other
browsing situations. 

-- 

"This cognitive dissonance as to what the proper analogy to HTML writing is 
seems to me to be the source of most of the markup/layout discussions."
                                        ( - Doug Loss on c.i.w.a.html)