Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Return of the WaSP

Posted by michael on from the nesting-under-your-eaves dept.

No_Weak_Heart writes "After a brief hiatus, the Web Standards Project (WaSP) has returned. Here's the story at Wired about this grassroots coalition which works to promote the adoption of web standards by authors, tool makers and in browsers. In a related vein, the Boston Globe has a comfy chat with Tim Berners-Lee, the guiding force behind many of those standards."

2 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. Use CSS to create 3-columned tableless layouts by starvingartist12 · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's totally possible to create great looking tableless, liquid, three-column layout using CSS.

    These sites have different tutorials for various column combinations and even backwards compatibility with Netscape 4.

    http://www.glish.com/css
    http://www.saila.com/usage/layouts
    http://homepage.mac.com/realworldstyle
    http://www.projectseven.com/whims/cssp_3box/3boxno script.htm

    The beauty of not using tables is that you're seperating structure from presentation. Basically, around some content, you specify what it is (structure). In the case of Slashdot's side navigation, in the XHTML/HTML you'd might surround the content with a DIV tag and give it an id/class of "sidenavigation".

    With tables, you're already forced to predetermine that you want to use it on the left column when you mark up the whole table in TD and TR tags.

    So how's CSS better than tables? Well, once you've defined the structure in XHTML/HTML, you can use CSS to define the presentation to say, I want anything tagged as a "sidenavigation" to be a vertical box on the left side that's X pixels wide.

    This presentation can be easily be altered by changing the CSS. You can tell CSS to move things to the right, maybe center it or whatever. And you can define a CSS specifically for handhelds. You can tell it to hide data, change font sizes, redefine colors, or anything you want. For the sight-impared, you could define the CSS to display it all in a simple, column-less layout. And since you have not predetermined the presentation in the HTML, the user could have defined their own stylesheets to override your CSS to present the content in the way they want it.

    With HTML and CSS (and also the XML and XSLT recommendations), websites can be so much more flexible.

  2. CSS is for separating structure from presentation by starvingartist12 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Abstraction breaks all that geometric structure, and the geometric structure is what the user sees.

    With proper HTML and CSS use, the abstraction at the presentation level doesn't actually break the structure. It merely seperates presentation from structure, while keeping structure together with the content/data.

    Scott Andrew said it best here:

    "...this illustrates a common misunderstanding about CSS. CSS is for separating structure, not content, from the presentation. Markup is meant to give meaningful structure to content. The content can come from a database or text files; the structure from page templates, a CMS or XSL transformation. Keeping your content free of meaningless structural elements allows you to pour your content into another structure suitable for different devices. CSS allows you to apply client-appropriate and easily-varied visual style to that structured output, without having to alter your markup."