---Raul Miller wrote: > As I understand it, CSS will not provide a useful replacement for > tables (except in special,limited cases) until CSS 3 has been > widely adopted.
It may be that CSS 3 will provide finer control over page layout than is currently possible, but given that many (most?) web sites created these days use structured HTML & CSS (rather than tables) for their page layout, it seems to me that: a) currently supported CSS can be a useful replacement for tables in many cases b) there must be significant advantages over tables for so many sites to have moved that way. Here a just a few pages/sites that use HTML & CSS for page layouts. http://arstechnica.com/index.ars http://www.python.org/ http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/ http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Books http://www.vector.org.uk/ http://www.apl2000.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_programming_language http://www.microsoft.com/ http://www.apple.com/mac/ http://www.ibm.com/us/ > Currently, however, CSS does rather well for dealing with > issues like fonts and other such mechanisms. For example, > <font size="+1">TItle</font> might be replaced by > <span class="Title">Title</span> (with an appropriate > definition for the class Title in the style sheet). > > This particular example is slightly more verbose, and some > of that verbosity can be eliminated by using predefined html > elements and redefining them, but the real advantage of CSS > is that you can design an abstract system which cleanly > expresses the styles that you want to use for some > document structure which likewise represents the documents > you want to represent -- and that can only happen if a person > carefully designs these structures. Automated transformations > can be made to work, but I see little or no advantage to > automated transformations which are not accompanied by > a well designed css structure. In my opinion, the major benefit of improving the current format of the J Dictionary would be a move to more structured markup of the content. Both Oleg and Raul have given examples of how structural markup declares the purpose or intent of an item on a page, rather than how it should look. Having well-designed structural markup (the structure of the CSS is of secondary importance in my opinion) is certainly important. Is anyone willing to suggest a good markup structure for J dictionary pages or provide improvements/criticisms of the structure that I've suggested? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
