Posted by Andy Dingley on 02/19/07 12:41

On 17 Feb, 15:17, "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorp...@cs.tut.fi> wrote:

> > A competent HTML + CSS author can thus re-work the presentation of a
> > page without needing to change a server-side scripting language they
> > might not be competent with. This is a good thing.
>
> Nope.

It's not one of the design aims of CSS and it's still not one of the
W3C's four listed benefits to CSS, but it's still an "emergent
benefit" that is extremely valuable to a lot of larger-scale projects.
Compare it to JSP vs. Java Servlets, and particularly to the use of
JSP EL (Expression Language) which _was_ deliberately targetted at
this benefit from the first.

There's a need for HTML+CSS-competent coders to be able to modify the
appearance and "skinning" of a complex server-side generated site,
without needing the skills or access to modify the scripting itself.
CSS provides this. This ability has become extremely valuable
(although sadly still under-used).

> CSS wasn't meant to act as a substitute for changing content or
> structural markup.

There's no need to. If the HTML is validly "structural" in nature and
is presentation-free, then the presentation layer is applied almost
entirely by the CSS and any reasonable and applicable presentation can
be applied to the same HTML. After all, if the HTML is structurally
adequate and the "presentation" change is strictly just that and
purely presentational, then this is obviously possible.


> If the problem is that you cannot edit an HTML document,
> then CSS is not the answer. Well, not to an _author_.

Why not? Which part is stopping you? Inflexibility of the HTML (Then
stop embedding presentation into the HTML) or incapacity in the CSS
(Are you really asking for more than a presentational change?).

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