Thorsten Froehlich wrote:

>>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.
> 
> Using cheap personal attacks will not exactly help your point :-(

It's not a cheap personal attack, it's an observation. You certainly 
SEEM to think that the web should be designed to your specification, and 
that's a naive attitude to have. It's also a rather arrogant one.

What I posted in my reply to Ken was a cheap personal attack. If I were 
to call you a kook - which I'm getting very close to doing - that would 
be a cheap personal attack.

> Nonsense!  The page gets bloated like hell if you use CSS or any layout for
> that matter!

The main CSS file for my site, which is used by the vast majority of the 
pages on it, is about 3200 bytes. It should logically only be downloaded 
by a browser which supports and displays CSS, and then only once as it 
would be cached thereafter. Each HTML file contains no more than a 
couple hundred characters devoted to CSS (for the link tag, classes and 
IDs), and often as few as 50 or so. That's as many as it takes just to 
add a proper DOCTYPE to the top of the file.

I don't feel that this constitutes "bloating like hell".

If you expect anyone to take you seriously, you must make more 
reasonable statements.

> Who wanted them?  The designers or the users?

Both.

The designers wanted specific control over layout and style, and they 
got it. The users wanted pretty pages that load quickly, which the 
designers were better able to give to them with CSS.

> I am saying that layout should not be specified at all!

No you're not.

When you put words on a page, they go in a certain order. That is 
layout. The sentences and paragraphs also go in a certain order. That is 
layout. Lines must break somewhere (or not). That is layout. There must 
be space between paragraphs (or not); that is layout.

If you have a table - even if it's filled with ordinary tabular data - 
it's still layout. If you put an image on a web page, where does it go? 
In the horizontal center of the page? On the side? At the bottom, after 
all the text? Maybe at the top? Should it be rendered inline or block? 
Should text flow around it? If so, how much room should there be between 
the image and the text? This is all layout.

Even the typographic controls that CSS gives designers, which you put 
down as an attempt to make the web work more like print media, exist IN 
TYPOGRAPHY for a reason. There are centuries of development in print 
with regards to fonts, font weight, spacing, leading, column width, and 
so forth.. things which apply to ALL text, everywhere.. things which do 
not fail to apply to text on the web simply because it's on the web.

What you're doing is making an artificial distinction between what kinds 
of layout are okay and which are not. Unfortunately, you're not doing a 
good job of defining the dividing line, let alone justifying its 
existence. I'll say it again: if you want every web page to look the way 
you want, turn off your browser's handling of designer-specified 
styling, or use a browser that supports user stylesheets and create a 
stylesheet that suits you. There's really no reason to throw away 
something that millions of people want just because you can't be 
bothered to turn it off, AND IT'S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.

-Xplo

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