Re: Mein gott, Nelson was arguing for CSS

Mark Baker (distobj@acm.org)
Thu, 11 Nov 1999 01:52:27 -0500


At 05:14 PM 11/10/99 -0500, David G. Durand wrote:
>Architecturally I'm curious as to what people on this list think. If we
>ignore network efficiency issues, would XML format specification be cleaner
>if documents had separate style and interaction sheets, or a single
>property sheet that specified all such parameters?

Any of the "interaction", "behavioural adornment" specs I've seen (BECSS,
Action Sheets and *CENSORED* 8-), have them together. Personally, I have
no idea why. Post-processing, when everything's mushed together in one big
compound doc, sure. But as a source document that has to be maintained,
referenced, and xpointer-ed into? No thanks.

Yes, there's a huge legacy of existing HTML docs that mix style, content,
and behaviour together. But no, we shouldn't continue to promote that as
best practice, IMHO. The HTML WG has made progress wrt presentation, but
not to behaviour.

MB