On Sep 8, 2005, at 5:09 PM, Christian Montoya wrote:
So then, what CSS should do, and already does, in some ways, is
control how our markup is handled by different medias, such that we
can hide certain things that wouldn't be helpful to a printed
document or a screen reader.
And as CSS improves, so does this ability. Under CSS3, you can add
images in the background or foreground, add text like quotes,
counters, and even attribute-based or arbitrary text (e.g., every
thumbnail can have accompanying text telling its pixel size), you can
move content from one point in the flow to another, and so forth. You
can do all this based on the medium, the properties of the medium,
and perhaps the actions of the user. But in order to fully realize
this, presentational traits must not be embedded in the markup.
Some people these days give an id value to every element (or most)
for this reason, and many will embed class information that has no
bearing on the current design. Some will add extra markup, taking
care that it does not change the meaning of the content, so that
future design options have the appropriate hooks to hang the CSS on.
For example, I give an id and a couple pre-defined classes to the
body tag of every page; only about 1/10th of them get targeted by the
stylesheet.
This can obviously go too far, especially the extra tagging. It's not
so obvious that stripping out all unneeded markup for today's
presentation limits tomorrow's presentational ability to any great
degree.
--
Ben Curtis : webwright
bivia : a personal web studio
http://www.bivia.com
v: (818) 507-6613
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