Posted by Jonathan N. Little on 10/10/05 17:29

Tony Cooper wrote:

> On Mon, 10 Oct 2005 03:39:45 GMT, "Jonathan N. Little"
> <lws4art@centralva.net> wrote:
>
>
>>>>>No argument from me on that score, but what is "right"? If the intent
>>>>>is to put up a single page with a couple of images, is placing the
>>>>>text and the images with CSS instead of 4.01 more "right"?
>>>>
>>>>I think you are mistaken here, 4.01 governs the structure and use CSS
>>>>for the style, your precious attributes are deprecated. What you
>>>>describe is pre-4.01, like 4.0 and 3.2.
>>>
>>>
>>>You could very well be right. The one book that I have on html is
>>>titled "HTML 4.01 Weekend Crash Course", and what I do is based on
>>>that book. I assumed that the information in the book is all 4.01.
>>>If it's not, I wouldn't know the difference.
>>>
>>>I'm not sure what you mean by "your precious attributes are
>>>deprecated".
>>
>>It sounds like 'HTML 4.01 Weekend Crash Course' wasn't worth whatever
>>you paid for it. Deprecated are legacy or proprietary elements or
>>attributes ear-marked for phasing out and their uses is discouraged. If
>>you use 4.01 strict doctype your code will not validate. A good place to
>>start:
>>
>
>
> You say the book wasn't worth whatever I paid for it. Yet, after
> about an hour's reading I'm doing what I want to do. That makes it
> worth the money as far as I'm concerned.
>
> I'd be willing to listen if someone would just provide some "why"s. I
> knew when I came to this group about what kind of comments I'd get.
> I've been here before and I've lurked at bit.

Ok I will give you an example, to illustrate the advantage of separating
your content for styling. A very plausible real-world example. you have
a large table with real tabular data, statistics and you decide to make
all the table headings white on black and bold text and the data cells
black on white. Also your page uses a serif font but you want your table
in sans serif, for this example I’ll say Arial.

In deprecated elements and attributes each table heading:
<tr>
<th bgcolor="black"><font face="arial" color="white">foo<font></th>
<th bgcolor="black"><font face="arial" color="white">bar<font></th>
...
</tr>

then your data
<tr>
<td><font face="arial">foo data<font></td>
<td><font face="arial">bar data<font></td>
...
</tr>

Now with 4.01 ands CSS
Style:

TABLE { font-family: arial, sans-serif; }
TH { color: white; blackground-color: black; }
TH { color: black; blackground-color: white; }

HTML:

<tr><th>foo</th><th>bar</th>...</tr>
<tr><td>foo data</td><td>bar data</td>...</tr>

Now remeber you have LOTS of headings and cells not just two here in the
snippet.

Now you get all done, you preview it and say to yourself, "Damn! I
cannot read it!" It looks really bad and you now want the headings not
white on black but dark red with pale gray background in a Courier,
monospaced font like an old MS Office doc example! Think about how much
editing it will take in the first example in deprecated elements and
attributes. With the second you leave the HTML alone and just change the CSS

TABLE { font-family: courier, monospaced; }
TH { color: maroon; blackground-color: silver; }
TH { color: black; blackground-color: white; }

You are all done. That alone should sell you on the concept.

--
Take care,

Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com

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