"Adam D. Ruppe" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected]... > > The important thing though is to make sure the html describes > the data well. Once you put in any kind of presentation in there, > you break this approach. > > class="red" no no, what if it's a blue theme? > > class="brand-name" there we go. > > class="grid" no no, what if we want it in a linear column? > > class="news-item" there we go. > > and so on; the html describes the data in as much detail as is > reasonable and the css makes the rest work.
In many cases I do agree, but there are some problems: A. While CSS is acceptable for styling (though I would change some things), it's pure shit for layouts. CSS3 doesn't change my mind on that. And beyond that, I have zero faith in W3C's ability to ever contrive "(X)HTML and CSS" into a real "model and view". No matter how much we *want* (X)HTML to be purely data-description, it just *isn't* and likely never will be. B. When you're talking about *inside* an article or posting, etc, all of that *is* the content. If the author intends something to be bold, italic, red, green, blue, whatever, then they should be able to specify it as such and not some vague psuedo-equivalent like "emphasis", "comment", "string literal", etc, that may or may not exist in the site's CSS and may or may not always even be what the author really wanted anyway. C. You may be operating with a workflow where the web designer is CSS-only, but that's not always the case, and I think reasonable argments can be made for doing it differently (point "A" above, for example).
