In article <3d73ab1d@news.povray.org> , Xplo Eristotle <xpl### [at] infomagicnet>
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.

but this was not a problem with HTML!  It was a problem with badly design
web sites by designers nopt understanding the concept of HTML and the web
media (not their fault, all they had ever seen was DTP programs).  So they
abused HTMl and then W3C came up with a technical cure for a desease by
killing the patient (being layout less content description).  Note that
tables do represent layout, but content if used what they are supposed to be
for (like in a spreadsheet)...

> (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

Of course HTML "never provided" it.  One just could control the layout like
fonts and font sizes more easily by nice buttons and menus rather than a
stupid text file.  Back to the future this is supposed to be, I assume...

> 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 :-(

> 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)..

Nonsense!  The page gets bloated like hell if you use CSS or any layout for
that matter!  I am suggesting to _remove_ it, not _replace_ it with
something I claim to be better!

> 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..

But that is my point!  If I want pages that look like printed, I get a
printed leaflet, not some web page!  Right now HTML and inparticular CSS
allow things that never were HTML in the first place.  Just expand the
acronym "HTML" to see my point!  In order to use CSS "properly" I have to
clutter up what once was HTML with endless references to styles.  What a
great separtation of layout and content that is!  It is a feature added like
a hack, like so many other HTML additions the W3C companies made!

> and since people wanted to do them, that is a solution.

Who wanted them?  The designers or the users?  Designers who were great a
print media design were suddenly supposed to be web designers but inseatd of
using the new medium invatively they demanded the features they always had
when designing for print media: Full control.  So this argument support my
point, not yours.  Sorry!

> 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.

You are still missing the point because you did not read what I wrote!  To
repeat myself:  I am saying that layout should not be specified at all!

> 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.

Design tricks to get web pages look like printed pages, an idea by designers
incapable to understanding that a web browser is not meant for WYSIWYG DTP,
and never was.

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

You did not even undstand what I said, so your conclusion just misses the
point.

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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In article <3D7### [at] scifi-fantasycom> , "Timothy R. Cook" 
<tim### [at] scifi-fantasycom> wrote:

> I did read what you wrote, but understand this: a website with no layout
> information has no way of placing images, so the images would be linked
> to separately by web designers.  Hence, the webpage itself would be text
> only.

This reply is supposed to be a joke, right???  Otherwise you obviously know
nothing about HTML :-(

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

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Thorsten Froehlich <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:
> Besides, did you notice that Mozialla has to be loaded at startup to appear
> it loads quickly?  In reality it is a slow fat memory hog.

  I don't have that option turned on, and it starts in about 5 seconds.
I can live with that.

> On the other hand, plain HTML renders on a 486 without problems (only
> decompressing the images will be a bit slower), and browsers won't need half
> a gigabyte of memory to run either!

  I just checked and Mozilla, with several pages loaded in browsing tabs,
uses 20 MB of memory. I have 256 Megs. I can live with that.

  By the way, how many people use a 486 to browse the web nowadays?
Mozilla might need something like a P-II 400MHz in order to run smoothly.
Well, I have a 1.2GHz Athlon. I can live with that.

> They allow designers to destroy web pages with tons of bandwidth wasting
> clutter.

  I'm sorry, but I don't see how the clutter "destroys" the page.
Pehaps you need to download a couple of kilobytes more than without the CSS,
but so what? I can live with that.

> So it is very possible to design a
> page that looks good without stylesheets

  Of course it is possible. You can clutter your pages with <font> tags and
other similar things, which make the pages larger (ie. slower to load) and
a lot more difficult to update (if you want to change some font property,
you have to do it in a million of places).
  I can't believe that you can't see the main reason for the existence
of CSS: To modularize the definition of a group of webpages. That is, define
common things in one place only, and avoid copy-pasting. As a coder you
should know very well how important modularity is.
  From what I see you are claiming that using explicit formatting tags for
everything is better than defining one modular CSS definition which is used
then everywhere.

> And did you notice how quickly the new Sun site loads compared to the old
> one?

  CSS doesn't make pages load slower. If anything, they make it load faster
because there's less copy-paste.
  Things that make a page load slower are quite independent of CSS.

  You have still failed to give any *reasonable* argument about why CSS is
bad. I'm not talking about who created it and why, or who is using it and
how and making what assumptions. I'm talking about the CSS format itself,
as a format, a definition, a standard.

-- 
#macro N(D)#if(D>99)cylinder{M()#local D=div(D,104);M().5,2pigment{rgb M()}}
N(D)#end#end#macro M()<mod(D,13)-6mod(div(D,13)8)-3,10>#end blob{
N(11117333955)N(4254934330)N(3900569407)N(7382340)N(3358)N(970)}//  - Warp -

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In article <3d73cb4a@news.povray.org> , Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg>  wrote:

>   Of course it is possible. You can clutter your pages with <font> tags and
> other similar things, which make the pages larger (ie. slower to load) and
> a lot more difficult to update (if you want to change some font property,
> you have to do it in a million of places).

You still miss my point:  ***No*** layout in the page!  No stupid font tags!

Apart from that, usually you exchange font tags by div tags or other ways to
specify styles in a CSS.  So it is not exactly like the data transmitted is
only the CSS.

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

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Thorsten Froehlich <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:
> I am against the layout being provided by the site.

  I apologize for my rude language, but the claim that text is better read
with no layout is just plain bullshit.

  There are lots of pages out there, where there are literally hundreds
of kilobytes of plain text in one enormous page. If I'm searching information
about something, those pages usually don't help too much. It simply takes
too much time and it's simply too tedious to try to find the information
I want among the thousands and thousands of lines of text.
  It has happened to me more than once that eg. searching something in
Google ends up in this kind of page. After I try to find something useful
for a couple of minutes I just give up and try the next Google hit; there
are usually a lot better layouted sites with the same information and it's
a lot easier to find there.

  A clear hierarchy, with sections, subsections etc. is the main way of
starting making a big page more clear. A large hierarchy needs a contents
or index page, or a site map in order to be easy to navigate. If there is
a lot of content, it should be divided into several logical pages. If a
page consists of several separated parts, eg. sections, there should be
a way to very easily see where does a new part start (a section name with
larger font is the main tool for this, but other additional features, such
as colors can make it even more clear).
  Hierarchy, sections, subsections, index, site map, visually marking
starting of different parts... All that is layout.

  You claim that the layout should be left to the browser, not the site.
However, the browser simply can't do most of those things because it has
no notion of the content. The site has to tell the browser information in
order to separate different items of the page.

-- 
#macro N(D)#if(D>99)cylinder{M()#local D=div(D,104);M().5,2pigment{rgb M()}}
N(D)#end#end#macro M()<mod(D,13)-6mod(div(D,13)8)-3,10>#end blob{
N(11117333955)N(4254934330)N(3900569407)N(7382340)N(3358)N(970)}//  - Warp -

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In article <3d73cb4a@news.povray.org> , Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg>  wrote:

>   You have still failed to give any *reasonable* argument about why CSS is
> bad. I'm not talking about who created it and why, or who is using it and
> how and making what assumptions. I'm talking about the CSS format itself,
> as a format, a definition, a standard.

The definition of the CSS _format_ itself to specify layout is not bad.  It
would be a great way to specify layout in DTP programs in a portable manner.
Just for HTML is it unsuitable.

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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Thorsten Froehlich <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:
> You still miss my point:  ***No*** layout in the page!  No stupid font tags!

  You do realize that tags like <H1>, <P>, <HR>, <I> etc are layout formatting
tags?
  No layout means that the whole page would be one contiguous line of text.

-- 
#macro N(D)#if(D>99)cylinder{M()#local D=div(D,104);M().5,2pigment{rgb M()}}
N(D)#end#end#macro M()<mod(D,13)-6mod(div(D,13)8)-3,10>#end blob{
N(11117333955)N(4254934330)N(3900569407)N(7382340)N(3358)N(970)}//  - Warp -

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In article <3d73cb4a@news.povray.org> , Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg>  wrote:

>   From what I see you are claiming that using explicit formatting tags for
> everything is better than defining one modular CSS definition which is used
> then everywhere.

Hell, do you really intentionally ignore what I keep saying?  Damn it, how
can one be sooooooo ignorant?!?!?   I said now a few hundred times that I do
not want *************any************** layout.   How can one construct from
the simple idea "no layout" that I keep repeating and repeating that I want
"font tag based layout"?????????????

Either you enter an argument and actually pay attention to the other person
or you don't argue!!!!!!!!!!!!

What I keep saying is:  No font tags, no div tags, no single pixel images in
tables, no layout!

Or don't you know what layout means?  If so, please look it up!


    Thorsten


____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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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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Thorsten Froehlich <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:
> I said now a few hundred times that I do 
> not want *************any************** layout.

  Ok, I made a version of one of the pages with absolutely no layout:

http://www.students.tut.fi/~warp/povQandT/languageQandT_nolayout.html

  Now I see what you mean. It's a lot cleaner this way! A lot nicer to read.
  Perhaps I should make all the pages like that.

-- 
#macro M(A,N,D,L)plane{-z,-9pigment{mandel L*9translate N color_map{[0rgb x]
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