2014-02-17 19:35, Richard Grevers wrote:
It must be remembered that the presentation layer is optional, and CSS
isn't always available. It might be due to a server error or timeout (i
experience that on maybe 1% of page loads), or, as HTML rendering
capability extends to ever-smaller devices, a physical limitation.
Or some of the other CSS Caveats may apply, see
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/css-caveats.html
<span> has no default presentation. So I tend to use it only in situations
where it doesn't matter if presentation is lost.
That's my approach too, but many people disagree.
I hope this mostly quite off-topic discussion ends, but I'd like to
summarize what I see as directly CSS related in the topic discussed:
Most HTML elements that can be used inside the body element have some
default rendering, which is largely (though not completely) describable
in CSS, and is being described in HTML5. We cannot always be sure of the
effect, though; there are browser differences.
When designing the use of CSS, the default rendering needs to be taken
into account. There are many approaches. One of them is extensive use of
<span> (which has no default impact on rendering) and <div> (which has
no other default impact than display: block), usually with class or id
attributes. Another approach is to use some of the "CSS Resets" (which
cannot remove all default rendering). In these approaches, the author
then writes explicit rules for all the rendering he wants. In a sense,
this resembles CSS styling of XML documents: you build up all the rendering.
A third approach uses elements with default rendering and considers the
implications, by overriding what needs to be overridden. You might also
explicitly set what you expect to be default rendering (such as b {
font-weight: bold }) if that's what you want, on the grounds that in
some browsing situations it might not be the browser default.
In all approaches, <b> is really not different from <strong> at all, for
example. Theoretically, they could have different default renderings,
but I haven't seen any evidence of such things actually happening. So
whatever you might think of <b> vs. <strong> or <i> vs. <em> vs. <cite>
etc., it's really not relevant to CSS.
Yucca
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