Posted by Neredbojias on 09/06/07 04:34

Well bust mah britches and call me cheeky, on Tue, 04 Sep 2007 21:11:57
GMT dorayme scribed:

>> I rather agree although I'd say the distinction between styling and
>> layout is the issue. Layout is required; styling technically isn't,
>> but paint on a car...
>
> The distinction between styling and layout is not quite "the'
> issue when it comes to the question about style and meaning
> generally. When style is spoken of in the context of these
> matters, it is almost always meant to include both colouring,
> sizing, and yes, positioning and layout too. And quite rightly
> for most purposes.
>
> An example of where layout is *obviously* crucial to meaning is a
> tabular table. A table is a good example of where how something
> is laid out determines its meaning. Once the basic
> meaning-related layout is achieved (greatly assisted by built in
> HTML table magic), there comes a time for the *stylistic*
> enhancements like colours, types of fonts, border types,
> background colours and so on. But it is not a clear cut thing. If
> you look at a table of atomic elements, you will see that some of
> the styling, especially background colours, play a more than mere
> optional role. These more than optional roles are where the
> blurring occurs. It is often quite difficult to think up ways to
> communicate things without the help of style.
>
> Another way to look at it is this. There is a built in styling
> (and I am not talking about default values, paras indented just
> so so) to writing html itself. The order of the paras are
> important to meaning. You can't be messing too much with classes
> and positioning here otherwise you will change the meaning of the
> whole, or confuse it. A list, visually, naturally, goes down the
> page in the order it is written. It does not change the meaning
> much if it is put inline. But there are constraints, you can't do
> just anything in css without affecting the meaning communicated.
>
> There is sometimes more than a marriage of convenience between
> HTML and CSS, sometimes it is a holy union. Its sanctity is only
> obscured by the triviality of so much that passes by on the
> internet.
>
> The best thing that any author can do is create create html that
> can stand on its own as much as possible. That means it will mean
> as much as what the author wants to convey as possible on its
> very own. Then it is time to hitch up. The marriage will be all
> the more successful, the more independent the html is in the
> first place. But that does not mean that the marriage *merely*
> enhances the meaning.

<Yawn> Reading all that made me really sleepy. Anyway, I think we're
generally in accord here and I particularly agree with you about html
standing on its own as much as possible. That's like the skeleton of the
proverbial animal. "There's no pheremones without dem dere bones."
However, semantics and separation and all that can be overstated as to
importance because the really important thing is how the page works and
looks, not how well it follows some hypothetically-optimal formulae.
Even validation can take second-seat if real world experience bears out
that a method or procedure is recognized overall and functional despite
what the w3c mopes have to say.

--
Neredbojias
Half lies are worth twice as much as whole lies.

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