Thorsten Froehlich wrote:
> 
> I am against the layout being provided by the site.  I want full control
> over the layout like I had in HTML originally.

HTML never gave you full control over the layout. It gave page authors 
control over layout with TABLE and invisible GIFs and things like that. 
And before that, it didn't give anybody control over layout.

> No visual clutter, just
> plain information (be it text or pictures) quick and easy to access.  Just
> like in paper books rather than commercial advertisements leaflets.

Try Lynx.. or set your browser to ignore CSS. (Or even create a user 
stylesheet, use that by default, and see every page with the fonts, 
colors, links styles, and so on that YOU want.. something which HTML 
never provided, incidentally. Sadly, not many browsers support user 
stylesheets yet, even though it's part of the "recommendation".)

> On the other hand, has the added layout feature solved any of the
> shortcoming of the original HTML like the inability to display formulas
> well? -- No, and it still does not.  And why?  Because nobody supports those
> "recommendations".

But the "recommendations" are there, and if someone did support them, 
and if people would upgrade to a browser that supported them - because 
they can't very well expect an unsupported old browser to magically 
learn new tricks - then those shortcomings would be solved.

> The problem is that rather than focusing on _solutions_, the W3C focuses on
> _features_.  This is a typical situation for industry organisations.  They
> never did and never will deliver something that is useful...

Your problem here is that you're naively assuming that you're the 
biggest smarty ever and that everyone should design the web to YOUR 
specifications. If I were you, I would abandon this line of reasoning 
immediately. Some people want fancy colors and fonts and layouts and 
things that blink and flash and jump around.. and almost anyone would 
prefer an attractive (but still simple) page to one that looks like it 
was written in 1992 and uses the functional but extremely boring browser 
defaults.

CSS isn't designed for web users, because they don't use CSS. They use 
web pages. CSS is designed for web authors. It lets us change the look 
of a web page or even an entire site much more easily than we could with 
HTML (and using far less code, which helps those poor dialups users who 
don't want to download a new browser).. and in that sense, it is a 
solution. It makes those pages easier to maintain later, and that's a 
solution. It lets us do things with pages that we couldn't do in HTML.. 
and since people wanted to do them, that is a solution. It lets us adapt 
pages to different browsing environments instead of having to abandon 
style altogether or create several versions of pages, and that is a 
solution. And by forming a standard for page styling that all future 
browsers will hopefully follow, we'll be able to make pages that don't 
look like crap without resorting to the sort of design tricks we had to 
use back during the days of "browser wars" and proprietary 
functionality. And as anyone who was making pages back then knows, THAT 
is most definitely a solution.

It's a hell of a lot better than your solution.

-Xplo

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