Posted by Andy Dingley on 11/08/07 11:29

On 8 Nov, 06:35, mbstevens <NOXwebmast...@xmbstevensx.com> wrote:

> Forcing markup like this:
> <div class="hr"><div><div><hr></div></div></div>
> is just unsemantic, even though it is technically valid.

So what? Who says HTML should be entirely semantic.

CSS is _very_ simple and deliberately (read Hakon Lie's PhD thesis)
doesn't include some of the features of other styling langauges.
Amongst these is the ability to do powerful content generation,
sufficient to generate the necessary "hooks" to hang each necesary box
of the rendering model onto. This is particularly evident when
clearing after a sequence of floated boxes.

Some stylesheet languages do support this, but they're more complex
than CSS. CSS gains its simplicity here by requiring the HTML to
already contain a sufficiency of "hook" elements that deliberately
have no smenatic purpose, they're only used (and necessary for)
presentation.

It would be nice to have a purely presentation-free HTML, but not at
the cost of needing to use DSSSL to style it!

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