Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 05/29/06 01:46

[f'ups narrowed]

On Sun, 28 May 2006, 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?

That doesn't really make much sense. Browser support for HTML/3.2-ish
stuff isn't going to go away any time soon, so if you've got a
quantity of that legacy stuff you might as well leave it that way. At
least until you're ready to radically rebuild it.

Properly-engineered HTML "Strict", marked up for its logical content
(such markup will mostly be missing from presentationally-composed
HTML/3.2) really should be built from the ground up. Trying to hack
existing presentational stuff into some kind of "equivalent" with CSS
isn't going to produce an improved product, really.

As spotted in another place recently:

|| Momentan leidet Dein Code arg an Divitis und verkapptem
|| Präsentationalismus...

(approx) "Currently your code is suffering seriously from divitis
and disguised presentationalism".

And that would be what you'd get, from any automated conversion.

It needs additional information input to supply the logical structure,
and get substantial benefit out of the separation.

> It can't be that hard to do,

On the contrary: I'd be inclined to compare it with trying to turn
cheese into fresh whipped cream. Both of them are milk products, it's
true: but if you want whipped cream then I'd suggest using fresh
starting materials, not trying to start from another end-product.
That's not so far from what you'd be trying in the attempt to turn
presentational HTML/3.2 into logical "strict" HTML with CSS
presentation(s).

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