Thorsten Froehlich wrote:
> 
> 11.1 "To minimize these problems, authors should use style sheets to control
> layout rather than tables."

Which strongly implies that use of a table constitutes "layout". 
Therefore, since you claim to be against authors having or exerting any 
control over a document's layout, you must want to rid the world of 
tables as well.

> Structure, structure. Layout! Structure is not layout! Blah blah blah!

Six of one is half a dozen of the other. You haven't got much of an 
argument if it depends on defining one thing as two different things as 
it suits your purpose.

> It would be absolute
> nonsense to prevent users from selecting layout as I detailed before.

I have never argued against that.

> users
> are allowed as much control over layout as they like, but with the broser
> providing defaults.  this is exactly how HTML used to work.

On which planet, Thorsten? Surely you don't mean Earth.

I have used many old browsers (and by old, I mean Mosaic 1-era.. they 
don't get much older than that). None of them gave the user any control 
over layout whatsoever. Most of them didn't give the user the ability to 
choose colors, fonts, font sizes and so forth.

By contrast, however, user stylesheets provide users a means to control 
nearly everything about the appearance of web pages.. far more so than 
any browser's preferences EVER did. And user stylesheets are a part of 
CSS. Is there some reason you can't understand this?

I find something else interesting: in this entire argument, you have 
acted as though you have some kind of inalienable right to see web pages 
however you choose, and that page authors should be required to make 
this as convenient as possible.

I haven't even touched on the opposite argument, which is this:

As the content creator, it is MY right to decide how my content is to be 
presented. If you want to see what I make, then you'll damn well use the 
software you need to do it. And if you're not willing to do that, then 
you can either suffer with poor page rendering, or you can do without my 
pages. Frankly, I think backwards people like you are screwing up the 
web for everyone, and even if I found it convenient to support your 
older software, I would be tempted not to, simply out of principle.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

-Xplo

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