Slashdot Mirror
CSS for the LDP?
Saqib Ali asks: "Over at The Linux Documentation Project there is a lengthy discussion going on about whether to use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to improve the presentation of the documents. I support the use of CSS to improve the image/formatting of the document, and improve readability. I understand that content is more important than the presentation, but it can't hurt to improve both. There are others who think we should not get involved the presentation layer, and mainly concentrate on the content. Since, most Slashdot readers are Linux users, and might have visited the LDP once or twice, I would like to poll them on what they think about implementing and using nice CSS for the documents on the Linux Document Project website. I've written a CSS for this purpose that is available here, and some sample documents available in this weblog. Any thoughts? Any pros and cons on using CSS to improve presentation?"
How about some CSS for Slashdot? Seriously.
Obviously content is the most important thing, but what possible reason could there be for not improving the presentation as well? Unless it somehow cuts into the time needed to prepare content (which is certainly shouldn't), it only makes sense to make things pretty.
Please do. It maybe will blow some new life into some documents (albeit artificial at first).
:-)
But man, that CSS is _really_ _really_ ugly
So how many people read the headline as Content Scrabling System?
If it's not in a man page, then I don't want it!
Seperating content from presentation is a good way to go. I see few disadvantages to the approach of using CSS to present content, on this, or any site.
Mmmmmmm. Floor pie!
I know this is a bit of a tangent, but...
"Most Slashdot readers are Linux users" - seriously? I know there's a strong anti-MS contingent, but this can't be true. Is there data to back that up or are you just talking out of your, er, hat?
#DeleteChrome
I fully support the idea. It's not a matter of "getting involved in the presentation layer," as opposed to the content. That's, after all, the whole point of CSS... To separate these concepts, and make them independently manageable.
It would be simple for a team to develop CSS files in concert with those who are already doing a great job developing consistent, predictable content. This project lends itself easily to improvements with CSS.
I'd only recommend that multiple CSS files be created, and people be allowed to choose one that suits them, or none at all.
i've seen people use css to increase their font size 1 to 4 inches from normal with just a few keystrokes with no side effects. this is just irritating... I hope they don't make it flashy or with obnoxious colors.
damn, i've been reading too much spam!
This would be a little Linux predation a la MSFT to force more users into using Open Office, right?
lol
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Exactly what presentation problem are you trying to solve? Make it look prettier? The UI is pretty solid. Just wanting to change the presentation layer without understanding what you are trying to achieve for the user is silly.
Thalasar
you fail it
It would be trivial to write a CGI script that would simply include, or not include the link to the CSS for each document. Assuming of course that all these documents are in XML (docbook?) format to begin with.
Photos.
Error: Acronym overload! Danger, Will Robinson! Danger! Jesus christ.
Translations:
Cascading Style Sheets-Uniform visual format for web pages.
LDP-Linux Documentation Project: Produce documentation for linux. Quite helpful.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
If you are going to go through all that work to reformat the documents, it seems more reasonable to go to an XML/XSLT system. For documentation projects XML is the way to go, so it can be viewed great in many applications.
Before you start whining that "it wont work in my browser," remember, there are several solution where the stylesheet is applied server side, and the page can be servered as plain old html.
Of course they should use CSS to make the pages look better.
Unfortunately, CSS won't solve the root of the problem: non-semantic HTML. I've re-done several sites to make use of the so-called semantic HTML tags (em, strong, etc.) and to get rid of nasty table-abusing layout tags. CSS is necessary to make this transition, but readability on non-desktop browsers (phones, terminals) can only really be improved by switching to layouts using semantic HTML tags and divs for layout.
One last point I'd like to get out there is that there are many console browsers (links, w3m, but NOT lynx) that do a fine job displaying abused table layouts. Unfortunately, the console usually has so few columns that everything just ends up looking squished, while as my div-layout pages are easy to read.
True story.
The best examples online are still probably this and this and even and slashdot style
Note that all those pages had the exact same html. Only the css changed. In their site (read the page) they have styles for all sorts of displays including wireless friendly ones.
Isn't this kind of silly? Why would we the Linux community actively choose to NOT use stylesheets? They're not complex and they're widely supported now. Only this community of emacs users at GUI-less workstations users would think it better to not use CSS. I see refusing their introduction as actively alienating users by refusing to implement anything that could possibly be considereed "eye candy."
I'm sure someone will mod this down as flamebait, but it's not meant to be. Truly, this is one of those times I find myself not so surprised that Microsoft retains so many customers - because you gotta sell the sizzle with the steak.
Of course they should!
CSS doesnt touch the content of a document at all - that's the whole point of it. You can "pretty up" a document without needing to redo all the content's code. In addition, no one doing to the documenting needs to worry about anything new - they just continue as always. The "extra" download can be turned off in cool browsers so that its formatted normally - heck, even a fancy JavaScript button can be set up to use different (or no!) style sheets.
So - Better appearance, negligable performance hit, backwards compatable, no change in article (html) formatting, and zero drawbacks. Why would they not put CSS into action? Even basic CSS can do wonders.
There's nothing wrong with making the pages more visually appealing, just don't overdo it.
I suppose if you provided a standard stylesheet that every document used, and each document author only had to worry about content and didn't have to bother with how it would look (since that's all handled with one good stylesheet forced on everybody), then it could work. Just don't, for the love of god, force each author to come up with their own stylesheet for everything. There should just be one standard one, and that should do it for everybody.
This article title reminds me of this poll. How many here actually deduced the content of the article correctly from the title?
---- Just another spud server.
Also, the full text should remain available in plain ASCII. Just my $0.02 worth. Thanks for asking!
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Well the problem is the CSS author, you, might make a CSS scheme that doesn't work well for a particular user. Many web authors forget that the user should come first and force certain colors. Whatever you do allow the user to override anything you do even if they wan't to turn back underline links or something like that. I would say though that content is better. A pretty show with bad acting is worse than a non-effect show with terrific acting, IMHO of course.
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
LDP should host Docbook documents.
Style should not come into this, except as presentation on the web site. Making individual CSS files for each document is retarded. Making ONE style sheet, targetting the output of Docbook->HTML is what I would do.
It seems to me that one should keep the actual documents as simple as possible in order to facilitate future conversions to other file formats or print media. If fancier presentation of that raw data is needed then that ought to be something that's automatically created.
www.sjbaker.org
I think you should create several different style sheets and give users the ability to choose which style they like the best or turn it off altogether.
I'd have to say that I'm all for the CSS update. I was a little ambivalent at first, as I've never really payed any attention to the presentation of the documents before. But the simple, content oriented style in use in the examples makes the documentation all the more readable. And if the style makes it easier and more accessible for people, then I say go for it. The more people who read your documentation the better, in any case.
Although there exists a defined template for the behaviour and appearance of each CSS element in the specification, there does not exist a browser that is fully CSS compliant. In fact, of all of them, Microsoft is the worst.
Now, the biggest argument here is that anybody using Linux will be using anything BUT MS products, but you're still not out of the woods yet. For, even between two browsers that are fairly good with CSS standardization, i.e. Apple's Safari and Mozilla's Firefox, you have not just suble behaviour differences, but also large gaps in the way each broswer handles such elements as left, right and relative positioning constants.
If all browsers had at least (somewhat) decent CSS compatibility, then I'd say yes, absolutely use it, because CSS has the potential to really imporove the layout of any site with minimal effort.
In my experience the only way to improve the presentation of a web site, document, etc. is to have a designer come up with a layout without the input from developers. After that, take what each group likes best and incorporate it into the project. Most developers I know aren't very good designers and when a bunch of them get together to improve the look and feel, what they usually get out of it is something different but not any more useful. Designers aren't always the best developers, but they tend to be very insightful on how things should "look and feel".
Then, to present the documents, LDP can automatically convert the documents into any beutified HTML format they want.
Furthermore, XML could be used to help users jump over the explanations and get straight to the directions. XML could also come in handy when analyzing documents and looking for ways to improve LDP.
CSS is great. You don't need to have the people writing documentation to write CSS. You can store your documentation in XML, transform it to XHTML, and have someone, anyone, write a stylesheet for it. Something along these lines would be my favorite solution.
Unless they can make even easier to use, it seems like a waste of time to me. I could change the look of things on my end if I really needed to.
I definitely think this CSS should be used as a formatting technique for the Linux documentation project. Since you can also apply to CSS to XML documents, why not just do that instead. Use the CSS to make it look pretty, and create separate style sheets for a GUI browser, and a text based, or allow a user to use their own (I have never seen this though).
:).
I guess the real advantage is that you can easily parse the XML and "port" the documentation to something else as well be it PostScript, PDF, or some other format that toggles your switch. In essence you're really solving 2 problems (if you consider for a moment there are 2 problems):
1) you make it look nicely formatted and pretty
2) the content is separated from the presentation, so if you want to switch formats later, it should be easy to parse it through with XML, and then set it up for some other document format programmatically.
Just my two cents at least.
I can't spell ripburger
I can't remember who said that long ago, but it is an important axiom.
:-) ) pay lots of money to be sure documentation is clear and attractive. Without commenting on success, they do spend those dollars and make the effort for a reason.
Many readers will tune out or find it even daunting to jump into a document that doesn't make an effort to present itself well. Even when the content is top notch, weak presentation will leave a poor first impressions placing the author on the defensive from the get-go. That's not to say good presentation will save a bad document... but every little bit helps!
If using CSS makes the documentation look more professional, more organized, easier on the eyes, and more consistient in presentation I say go for it. Just don't fall into the mistake of overdoing it and continuously changing the presentation... then effort will be wasted.
One final point: corporations (including Microsoft
Cheers!
HTML doesn't tell you anything more than this is a Paragraph, this is a List, this is a heading. Ironically, it's practically worthless for semantic purposes and much more useful as a very simple layout markup
Presumably, the LDP is using some form of SGML or XML markup, which is where the real semantic information is.
Well, I went to that link for the poll, and all I saw was what I presume to be CSS source code. Mozilla didn't render it at all.
This is why I'd vote against it. I need docs when things aren't working right, and when things aren't working right, I need something I can read with cat, less, and or vi.
Like the users. This user at least.
...enhances communication. As does correct spelling, accurate proof-reading and grammar checking. All these have been noticeably lacking in some on-line documentation, open-source works not excepted. I favour the use of stylesheets as an aid to clear and consistent presentation of online documents.
How about all the people out there that read Docs, have no intention to contribute because of diffrent reasons (poor grammar ;), just don't want to) but they are good and excell in taking existing content and making it look better.
.......
I think that anyone who would want to take on the job all the best to you!!
It might even make more people intrested if it didn't look so intimidating (endless links, etc)
Just a guess
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
I understand that content is more important than the presentation, but it can't hurt to improve both.
Techs are notoriously for slamming style over substance. To me it's like asking what's more important, breathing or eating? The answer is both.
Yes, beautifully displayed text with bad content is junk, but a lot of people are more prone to believe pretty junk than ugly genius.
First, make it right. Then make it look good. Then go back and make it more right. I used to be of the addage "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", but now I think "if it ain't broke, fix it again!" There's always room for improvement.
Ruby on Rails Screencast
I'm sure, there are people, who will only work on one of the aspects, because the other is not fun for them. So, just don't reject the cosmetic modifications and make sure, the "content providers" are not yelled at for breaking the form on occasion.
Unlike a commercial project, which has to think on how to split the money, you can "afford" to have both.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Assuming they are using Apache then they could just use Apache::Sandwich to include the CSS tags.
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
Only a geek would think these two are seperable.
--hsm
Last time I looked, which wasn't recently, CSS did not provide all the parameters necessary for page markup. For example, there was no way to change the spacing (leading) before paragraphs or after paragraphs.
The people who designed CSS were not typesetting professionals.
The result is that, if you use CSS, you must also use a proprietary scheme, also, to finish the job. But, implementing a proprietary scheme defeats the intended purpose of CSS.
If CSS were designed well, it would be possible to use the same kind of markup system for both the web and print.
- "professional" anything. +10 points
- Advocates using "Lynx/Links", "Dillo", "Netpositive" and, my favorite, "Geckos" to test websites. +15 points
- "CCS'ed" documents. +5 points
- "also include the FONT SIZE, bgcolor and Bold or Italics tags." + 50 points. (apparently Slashdot subscribes to this ideology)
- "use HTML markup for heavy layout stuff, because most of the browsers above won't be able to handle it." +1,000 points
- As of my previewing, being scored at +3 insightful, +1,000,000 points
I am very impressed.concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
Also I forgot to mention this: If anyone is willing to write a good CSS for DocBook XML content and GNU Public License it, please feel free to post at @ Linux Document Project Blog . Thanks.
http://validate.sf.net
Keep text/html documents formatted for text and concentrate on better layout for the PDF versions... do more than just copy-n-paste the text in to a PDF editor and save, use PDF's strengths and reformat the documents for better presentation and printing.
Another problem with CSS is that you can easily get carried away and format in such a way that it becomes impossible to read (in order) in text based browsers.
'nuff said.
The question shows a profound mis-understanding of CSS.
If anything, CSS reduces the effort on style in LDP, not increases.
CSS would be just one line,
<link href="ldpstyle.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
Thats it. And that could be put in by php elsewhere. Heck, you could even exclude it alltogether and let people set their own style.
the pages could then concentrate purely on content. Don't say font/i/b if its not needed, use pre/tt/em/strong tags. e.g content, not style (pre formatted, typewriter, emphasized, strong text).
Don't use tables, if it isn't a table you are describing. use div's (and class=..., ok one more css usage, but not required).
I can't tell you the number of times I have been annoyed when someone writing a webpage assumed style tags like font (+size, -size) should be used, it makes a blind assumption about the viewer of the page, their resolution, fonts available etc. Far better to use CSS, and avoid any style at all in your content, just use a separate, includable css page for the style.
Far too many pages on the web use content related tags to do style (table) and style related tags to do content (b, i, font=courier). I for one would be thrilled to see CSS used in LDP to reduce this horror.
What is this kind of trolling? Have you never seen a non-english speaking person in your life? (I am not british FYI)
This sounds very stupid until you have a problem that precludes X from running. A botched graphics card driver installation, for example. The CSS would definitely need to be done in a way that doesn't fuck up text mode browsing.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
However when it comes to the LDP i'm reminded of the phrase "You can't polish a turd." The LDP has glaring issues and faults it needs to address or at least figure out how it plans to address. Part of that can be a new format with CSS, but I don't care how well coded a 3 year old howto with downright sketchy advice is.
You can see in gentoo's website that they have a very nice consistency in their documentation, it really helps the human eye find what's needed among all data, so Im all for it
you go ldp!
There shouldn't actually be any formatting in the HTML. HTML (and XHTML, for that matter) are Markup Languages, not formatting languages. If you want to determine how the page looks, then yes, you should use CSS. This also makes it easier to transform the LDP into other formats, as it's simply a matter of changing the CSS file.
Admittedly, this is something of a hardline view. I don't think it's a particularly unreasonable one, though. I'm currently re-writing Slashdot's old HTML to be XHTML/CSS. It's by no means an easy job, but I would argue that the potential gains (less bandwidth, easier to change styles, seperating formatting from content) are worth it.
Er, if you're going to use the HTML equivalents for everything, why bother with CSS to begin with? Isn't the whole point of using stylesheets to separate style/formatting from content? Doing it your way, they'd have to not only update the CSS, but also go through the HTML and change all of the bgcolor attributes of table cells to make it look consistent.
They'll be using something with a pretty good CSS implementation like Mozilla.
I think it goes without saying that Linux folks should embrace CSS. It's sort of a no-brainer. That being said, another advantage is style-sheets for different media. In particular, LDP pages are likely to be printed (I printed one the other night for a Linux install where I didn't have a live Internet connection), and even with all the problems, a smart designer can make very nice print stylesheets that use serif fonts (not so good on screen, very good on paper from a readability standpoint), add banners that print on each page, etc. This assumes a well-structured document that the CSS is styling, but that's a big advantage.
Online citizen journalism from the inner city: The View From The Ground
Adding Style and Orginization never hurts!, I mean, why do you think that so many people believe that Linux is just for hackers and such. If we make our documentation a little more apealing and organized It can only help our image more. It sure can't hurt anyway! CSS is so simple to impliment and provides huge results!
That was one of the most brutal Slashdottings I've yet seen. Web developer type too
I think any CSS detractors are missing the point - docs should be marked up consistently, with H1, H2, etc. Particular semantic types (like author) could be added as styles for particular tags e.g. Adding CSS would be relatively simple on top of semantically structured docs.
No, this is an incorrect view. CSS is about separating CONTENT and PRESENTATION. That means no font, bold, or italic tags. This is all done in the style sheet. Additionally, font tags, etc always take precidence over style sheets.
By using proper XHTML (or HTML 4.0) and sticking to valid tags (heading tags, emphasis, lists) the page will automatically degrade nicely and be viewable in ALL BROWSERS. This includes lynx and other text only browsers.
The browsers that support CSS will use it, and it will look prettier for them, and browsers that do not support it will still display the content perfectly even though fonts, etc could be wrong.
Also note that by using CSS, the site will be easier to maintain. The removal of font, bold, italic, and underline tags will also make the site lighter and faster. Note that CSS is cached by the browser, so that file only has to be downloaded once.
Please look at The CSS Vault and CSS Zen Garden as great examples and references. CSS Vault has page after page that justify the use of CSS and valid XHTML. Also notice that if the browser cannot use CSS, the site still renders all the content properly.
An important additonal note: By using proper XHTML and CSS, the disabled will have access to the site in a much easier fashion due to the lack of tables being used for markup (tables only for data!), and the simpler code. This is for special screen reading browsers.
"BEHOLD, CORN!!" - Dr. Weird, ATHF
There's nothing wrong with CSS in and of itself, but the because issue facing the LDP is NOT how they should handle presentation. It's the seriously outdated content in many HOWTOs and FAQs. If I had a say, that's where I'd "vote".
CSS & LDP, PDQ!
;)
No, but really, it is always a good idea to make docs user-friendly, especially when the Linux community as a whole is trying to recruit the troves of Windows users out there. Anything to make user experience more friendly shouldnt be overlooked.
Who among us here doesnt remember that first RFC that we gasped in confusion at? And the fact that it was entirely in Courier 10 didnt help
Intelligence is like four wheel drive, having it just means you'll get stuck in more remote places.
I know a mucho browsers that don't support XHTML in its whole. For example />.
is not understood by many of these browsers or when you close some tags at the end as
I was looking around the LDP and noticed that a lot of the more major, less specific HOWTOs are getting fairly out of date, with some not having been updated since Kernel 2.2. They need contributors who know their stuff.
.txt format as well. And that is most important.
Also, CSS is fine, so long as you can still get the docs in
this is flamebait, but i'll reply just for the record. MS IE is not CSS compliant despite what MS says. the designs in those pages look beautiful in my galeon window, and i lose no content.
ato
What they need to do is firstly draw a line in the sand. If it doesn't support CSS then it will look boring (or crap if the browser doesn't properly ignore the CSS). Catering for every release of every browser is why new standards take sooo long to become popular. Secondly define a set of styles that are then applied to the bits of the document (like they have).
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
That was "br /" (slashdot rendered it instead of showing it as text, even if I used "Plain Old Text" when submitting the comment).
Please explain to me why in God's name you are using IE 5 on OS9, and then trying to give a convincing argument for CSS being bad when you are using a browser that has shit CSS support?
Upgrade to atleast IE 5.5 for MacOS or get a real browser! I hear mozilla.org has a fine product available. FOR FREE EVEN!!! I know NOT paying for simple things like web browsers is hard for a hardcore Mac zealot like yourself to understand, but trust me, using a standards compliant browser which supports the new standard you are evaluating is a Good Thing (tm)
If bad puns were like deli meat, this would be the wurst
In all fairness, when it debuted, Internet Explorer for OS 9 was the most standards compliant browser on the web. It still does a pretty decent job. The trouble is that it's a dead browser, and will do an increasingly poor job at rendering the web, as web developers start using more advanced CSS techniques.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
When I first used gentoo linux, I was most impressed by the quality of the documentation provided.
And then I realized. It wasn't necessarily high qualty nor at the time did it contain better content than the guides for Debian and Red Hat. It was presented in a much cleaner format using CSS and a nice clean layout. Since then, the quality of the gentoo documentation has only improved.
Compare this gentoo page with this TLDP page.
See the difference? They both contain useful information. The TLDP documentation makes me feel like i'm reading a legal document. Blegh! The gentoo document is much less harsh on the user.
This is scary, considering that gentoo is widely considered one of the most difficult of the linuxes to use, as it contains absolutely no installer. Thanks to the clear documentation, I actually perfer the gentoo installation process over fedora's, as it's easy (thanks to the documentation), and gives me a tremendous amount of control. I think this fact can only be capitalized by the fact that I use a mac 95% of the time as my desktop machine.
Please... add some color. It helps. Lots of people are visual learners. It just so happens that most linux users aren't (Reading a monotonous 26-page manpage on ls of all things makes me want to gouge my eyes out)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Two years ago, Mac IE 5 was considered to have the best CSS support.
I'm not saying you should bend over backwards to support Macs, but it does demonstrate that "Degrades Gracefully" bit about CSS is farse. See also Netscape 4.x.
Ahem. This is completely silly. Well structured documents--a prerequisite for good CSS--degrade *better* in browsers like Lynx because the underlying tag structure reflects the logical document structure.
Why would anybody do that? Modern browsers like Firefox are actually zippier, even on older hardware, than Netscape 4.xyz. A designer should think about how to make the page degrade because many of the browsers you mentioned choke on some CSS. But there are lots of tricks for hiding the CSS from those browsers, and if you do, then the user still gets a nice, logically structured document.
Anyway, CSS isn't all that hard to do right. I just did a site that looks really nice and polished and works in every browser (IE, Moz, Firefox, Safari, Camino, Konq, Opera, Lynx) on tons of platforms (Windows 98/ME/2000/XP, Linux, OS X, OS 9)...and it worked on the first try -- I didn't have to change a single thing (rsvp.uchicago.edu). I tested it on all possible combinations of those I could think of and it looked nice (and in the way I expected) on all of them.
Finally, I can't imagine a situation, except using minimal HTML 4, which would be silly, because it'd practically be XHTML at that point, where it would be heavier that the XHTML/CSS equivalent. Even if the stylesheet is relatively large, say 300-400 lines (I'm pushing 500 on a site I'm working on), it typically downloads once and then gets cached, at which point all subsequent pages that use that stylesheet will only download the nicely structured document.
Online citizen journalism from the inner city: The View From The Ground
Seriously, what could the cons possibly be?
Breakfast served all day!
Wait, these are examples of how powerful CSS can be. That sorta implies you need to use a non broken browser to view them properly. I totally agree that going bleeding edge for something important like documentation goes against the kiss principle, but you are making it sound like CSS is a bad thing. Really, the reason you can't view those pages correctly is you are using a browser that is known to render CSS poorly.
Man...I looked everywhere for Mac IE 5.5, but the internet ran out before I could find it.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
What I wanna know is, will the Linux Documentation Project endorse the use of Flash, VRML, Javascript, and animated gifs?
BSD rocks.
You sir, are teh win.
If bad puns were like deli meat, this would be the wurst
Will the VP tell the VIP to move the TC to the JTC?
ok I fail it. Mod me -1 please.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
You won't believe it how many Linux/Unix users use Lynx and Links. So please, think of them.
I guess I'll bite...
CSS is designed to breakdown gracefully on browsers that don't support it. Also, the use of @import will keep 4.0 browsers that don't support CSS from trying to figure out wtf to do with all that CSS code. Really, you are a professional web developer and you don't know that CSS doesn't break/slow down browsers?
If bad puns were like deli meat, this would be the wurst
the slashdot crowd would rather have a site in all FLASH
Gee, that's funny, I could read it perfectly fine in IE 5.2 on Mac OS 10.3. Wonder why that might be. Oh, yes, I turned off CSS in the browser.
Normally I wouldn't post a reply to something like this, but the whole shitty, breakable design that is so much of the web is in large part due to supporting pathetically old and broken browsers and proprietary extensions. NS 4 anyone?
Mac IE 5.2 did way better than previous Mac browsers with CSS but it is by no means some sort of quality benchmark. ON TOP OF WHICH, you could easily write CSS that does something to make a site look better, but is still simple enough for Mac IE 5.2. It's rather ridiculous to take a broken browser and say "look, I know it's borked but look, it doesn't render this site correctly". What makes this even better, is that the site is entirely usable because thankfully MS did include the ability to disable style sheets (or use your own) in Mac IE 5.2.
There's no reason not to use CSS unless it means that someone who would otherwise have been writing documentation is now writing CSS. I believe it more than likely, however, that there are people who would be willing to work on the CSS but who would otherwise not be involved in the project.
You may be a 'professional' web developer but you cannot be a very good one if you are recommending the use of appearance tags in HTML. Actually, I didn't know there was such a thing as a 'professional' web developer. I guess everyone wants to be a professional these days.
Ronald said nothing. He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse, and rode madly off in all directions.
I have been using DocBook in a project recently, and I think it is a much better alternative to using CSS. If you write the documentation in DB, then you can export it to a PDF, HTML, or a number of other formats. (I'll plug the http://www.asteriskdocs.org project)
I have no signature
Note the past tense worked. Hopefully all the Teach-Yourself-HTML-in-21-Days clods who think like this, fully failing to grok the classical content, structure, presentation divisions, are now out of work...
Yeah you know me!
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
CSS makes text mode browsing even BETTER because it removes presentation from content (well, much better than without CSS at least).
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I am a professional web developer, I worked for years in UK as a web designer/developer
More like you are an unemployed web developer who hasn't worked in 3 years. Netscape 4 is dead, and so is your HTML knowledge.
There's more than one person working on LDP, so do whatever you're best suited at. If that's CSS, then put in some CSS. On the other hand, if you were the only person working on it I would skip the CSS and put in some friggin content!
I'm a FreeBSD user who has to dabble in Linux from time to time. So every time I need some Linux info I go to LDP. What I generally find are horribly out of date HOWTO's and incomplete manpages. Quality content is lacking. For example, the XFree86-HOWTO was last updated September 2001. Maybe not a lot has changed since then, but considering the sparsity of information in this document, someone could have at least expanded a bit on several areas. Another example is ALSA. This was recently added to the 2.6 kernel, but the HOWTO was last updated November 1999!
So go ahead and work on your CSS. But find out who's in charge of content, and give them a swift kick in the butt!
p.s. Don't go too wild on the CSS. Make it use the standard DocBook-XSL produced HTML. For a good example see FreeBSD's stylesheet. It's not going to win any NEA grants, but it gives a consistant professional feel to all of the FreeBSD HTML docs.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I used to love Linux howtos and faq's. They were great - a charm to read, just like RFCs.
.txt file.
Then they began to htmlize them, and I couldn't just less then any more. Which, quite frankly sucked.
Then they began to come in "chapters" instead of one giant file. Which, quite frankly, sucked even more.
I'm sure there's an option to get all the howtos and documentation in good old ascii out there _somewhere_, by the gods the LDP has made those more difficult to find.
And not, this is not an attempt to troll. It's an honest frustration. You cannot search a html document which contain 20 different html-files (one for each chapter) like youc an search a single
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
This is the triumph and glory of open source: no-one can say what you should be doing. If you're really interested in Linux documentation, and really interested in content design and display and really interested in CSS and engines to format stuff in CSS, then shine on, you crazy diamond. Fork that bitch and add CSS to your heart's content.
If your project turns out super keen, they might roll it back into the main project, and if they don't, hey... you've got that CSS itch scratched and you better believe some people will like the look and use your doc project instead of the main one.
Go for it. Don't bother asking anyone's permission, just grab the code and go. Such is the power of OSS.
SoupIsGood Food
I think you should use CSS to separate content and presentation.
One of advantage of CSS is reduce your HTML code size, therefore it reduce your traffic network as well. This is possible because, the CSS file is only loaded once to client and store in the computer and the browser will use the same CSS file to present the other HTML file.
Other is, improve readability or your code for the search engine spider.
The best use of CSS, other than offering an easy way out of spending time on formatting (in favor of time spent informing) is any consistent presentation of the documents. I want to learn LDP documentation structure once, so I can quickly look for author attribution, platform (version, distro, HW, etc) details, publication (relevance) date, and "related links" to projects, docs, presentations, discussions, etc. Using CSS will not only make that structure easier to produce and comply with, it will make it easier for me to read, and to discard inappropriate docs more quickly. It will also make indexing the docs for searching much more straightforward. Get right on that!
--
make install -not war
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I have the latest version of IE and those pages work just like they're supposed to.
Whining that IE 5.0 doesn't fully support CSS is just braindead. It's an old browser. MS has been working on compliance and updating their browsers. If you insist on using a broken version when fixed versions are available, that's your issue. Not Microsoft's.
IE 5.0 has been fixed to support lots of new things. And now it's called IE 6.0. What did the guy bitching about IE 5.0 seriously expect? That MS would make changes but keep the same version number?
"MS IE is not CSS compliant"
Which version? Apparently Mr 5.0 hasn't figured out that when MS puts out an update for IE it usually changes the version number. MS was obviously aware that 5.0 wasn't up to spec. So they patched it. The latest patch brings you up to 6.0. So if you're not keeping up with patches then you really have no place to bitch. They did obviously fix the problems. You just refuse to apply the patch(es).
Ben
Work Safe Porn
You could always give the user the choice to use stylesheets or not. It's not difficult to do. Seems like a natural solution given the target audience's fondness for choice.
The poster, in the mailing list, asked for resources on colour theory... my (artist) wife usually likes Hand Print very much.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Congratulations! You have single handedly just killed the entire idea of using CSS to separate content from design. Good job.
Writing CSS that degrades well is quite easy...and addictive once you start down the road of standards-compliant code.
Here is what needs to be done... read every CSS article at http://alistapart.com/topics/css/
http://alistapart.com/articles/slashdot/
...meta-whatever that the whole of everything else should be torn apart and redone to incorporate."
No, that's not going to sail. Why do people think they're so important that they should even attempt such a thing?
If you want to help, contribute documentation. Don't mince around attempting to lord over the people who do contribute documentation.
---
While I like css and think it makes the best looking pages with neat code, I think the existing pages are in a wonderfully simple format. These pages need to exist in such a pure form so that people can save the html and do as they like with it (like make a book).
The documentation is all layed out in a logical manner and no navigation tree on each page is needed.
MAKE YOUR TIME
Content is not mor important than content if the user experience is so bad that people flee from it. I don't use LDP because I can find the same information on the net by Googleing with out being insulted by "purists" who surf the net in Lynx.
My vote is for CSS.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
What I have found to work well is the use of a little css. You can use css to set font size and font family, and href attributes, but I still use tables for layout. I find they scale easier when dealing with internationalization and forms where you want label / input in columns. I try to avoid nexted tables. Doing this makes the pages still viewable in old browsers, or limited browsers, but also makes it a nicer experience in newer browsers. People still use lynx, and links and neither has support for css. They both kinds just strip it all down.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
Sure, use CSS! But if you're short of time/expertise, don't reinvent the wheel! Use the W3C Core Styles.
And if none of those style sheets quite tickles your fancy, you can use one as a base to modify.
I wasn't aware it was 'Tell it like it is friday', but I'm all for extending the day.
Yay me!
- Being modded down after that wicked burn: Priceless
-- paperThis isn't intended as a flame or a troll, though it may be seen that way.
First of all, the one language that's going to really move Linux documentation forward isn't CSS. It isn't docbook, and it isn't XML or XSLT or texinfo or anything like that. It's English. Let's face it: lots of Linux documentation is poorly written. It doesn't just break grammar and style rules; it's intelluctually muddy, unclear, imprecise, and just hard to understand.
Honestly, if the Linux documentation people don't focus on promoting a good, clear expository writing style as their first priority -- which it obviously is not -- then I don't care if they hire a team of 1,000 super-talented typesetters and graphic artists to dress it up. Linux is a good operating system, and it has some good technology in it, but if I were writing a little summary of Linux, I'd put documentation under "minuses" and not "pluses".
(Which is not to say all other operating systems are better. Windows documentation seems to have a consistent style, but part of that style is dumbing things down enough that most of the useful information is removed.)
I would say that that was the design of that site, not something fundamentally wrong with CSS.
A light, simple, standards-compliant CSS sheet can render well in 98% of the browsers and add quite a bit to readability.
I am surprised there is this much debate around such a simple thing. CSS can save bandwidth and development time and add quite a bit to user experience. Yes, use it.
Gentoo suffers from having too much documentation, that is not atomized.
yes the style sheets work, but a framework to have broken down websites,
something that I'm calling factodendrons
(brokn and tree)
stored into a database could allow reuse of data, and instant reformability of the web page..
see the bug: http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42823
42823 enh P2 All NEW Separate architecture-specific instructions dynamically
Please use [ informative / summarizing ] SUBJECT LINES
Flame me here
equals all around goodness.
Seriously though, good presentation is paramount to any communication. In the case of the web, using CSS is a good way to present your information.
If you want your information to be read/seen/heard, present it well, target your audience. This being said, theres no point in making something look pretty if the content is non-existent. You have to have the substance or else you're wasting people's time
The only thing better than something that works well is something that works well and looks good. With CSS, if users don't like the way you've presented things at least they have the option of changing it to some degree.
IEs CSS on PC works extreemly well.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Therefore, even though it sucks, it has to be reckoned with and worked around.
Safari is also a very good browser, but one of the pages came up all crap in that as well.
My point remains: Never do something complicated, when something simple will do.
Also, here's an example as to why this would matter:
My G3 has IE5. Navigator SUCKS on this machine (I've tried - several times), so I use IE on it. I'm trying to coax Linux along on a *true* POS (A Compaq Presario - one of the Radio Shack specials from a few years ago - I'm not adverse to all challenges...) and frankly, the Linux install isn't going well. I must often resort to cruising the web on my G3 in IE.
So, I go to a website to get info on Linux, and it blows up in my browser, preventing me from getting the Linux box working?
We. Don't. Think. So.
Yet another reason to Not Even Bother. (But yea - I shall trudge on, even as the cards are stacked agin' me.)
So, no, I'm not flaming him at all, I'm simply using the most common browser on the most common non-Linux, non-MS OS.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
LDP has some great content. However, a lot of LDP content is very out of date, and therefore not very useful.
A couple of examples where great content overrides lack of fancy formatting: Google and Wikipedia.
This is not to say LDP shouldn't use CSS. I just don't think it's as big an issue as content.
Find free books.
except for the broken CSS shit I've seen ...?
CSS is the way to go. It makes it much easier to maintain pages, it means the document authors don't have to be the style managers, and it means less to download. With care CSS can be used to make pages that look very nice in a graphical browser and still function well in lynx.
Another advantage is the ability to have styles based on media. Display ads (if necessary) on the viewed pages but hide them on the printed (saves paper and ink/toner).
I use CSS so that I don't have a lot of formatting to get around when I want to update my web pages, or to make the programming easier.
<p align="center"><font size="4">My big centered paragraph</font></p> is amuch messier than <p class="parcent">My big centered paragraph</p>
Sig is on vacation
Damn. You've found us out. I suppose we might as well all come clean.
The truth is - we're staunch Microsoft Windows fans. In fact, many of us work within various business units involved in Microsoft's marketing. We really don't dislike Microsoft. And we certainly don't use Linux.
Except for one guy. See - there is, in fact, one Linux user in the world. We created this environment just to screw with his mind. I'd tell you who he is (we all know)... but that would ruin the fun. Part of the game is to sign up, discover the "true believer", and then become part of the conspiracy.
Without giving it all away. But hey - its over now. Been fun while it lasted. My only regret is that there aren't really many other candidates to play with. I'm affraid we've been a little too efficient while "on the job." I suppose there's always those two BeOS guys.
I know this sounds pretty far-fetched. Heck - just think of the man-hours and funds we've had to float to pull this off. All I've got to say is two things:
1) Expense account.
2) What's the use of millions in liquid assets if one can't have a bit of fun with it?
I am not at all a CSS expert, but it sounds to me like what's being proposed is the stripping out of any marking and formatting that can be and is useful when viewed with a browser, say lynx, that doesn't support CSS.
So what you're proposing is sort of a No CSS support? Then NO SOUP FOR YOU! scenario.
You can claim that it doesn't impact non-CSS browsers all you like. If it renders invisible all the special markup when viewed on said browser, it most assuredly does impact them.
---
If an important word in a sentence is bolded with plain markup tags, it will appear bold, or underlined, in a non-CSS browser. If you consider it 'graceful breakdown' for the bolding to disappear entirely, I don't know what you'd consider 'un-graceful.'
---
Hrm. You're misunderstanding. Semantic markup means put your headers in h1 ... h5 tags and put your paragraphs in p and your lists in ol or ul or dl and your quotes in blockquote or q. Then the browser will render it boringly but readably if it has no CSS. If it has CSS then it can be rendered beautifully.
Non-CSS browsers then end up missing out on pretty, but not content.
Of course, you could force IE to support CSS for your site...
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
I dont know much about programming.
But I'd love a CSS style implementation for open office.
Timang tinggi tinggi
parang sudah asah
alang alang mandi
biar sampai basah
In fact, I'd rather have everything laid out in the simplest possible format. It gives documents that "nostalgic" feel that newer, fancy, glossy presentations using CSS don't quite have anymore. You know, that 1990's feel that web pages) had. It also makes it possible to print things out and have them look reasonable, where formatting them in some fancy shmancy way might screw up that aspect of the formatting.
Finally, the RTFMs aren't supposed to look fancy... Otherwise, they might be called RTMs, and that might be confused with RPMs. I can just see a whole slew of n00bie questions like: Linux is the suxx0rz because RTM isn't compatible with RPM!!!!!!!!11111
Nooooo.... We have enough problems answering people's questions about how to get X working in ten terminals at the same time, and how to make something bold in vi. (Speaking of vi, emacs sucks.)
I have nothing against presentation so if a decent css (and the one the original author did isn't bad at all) is used I would not be against it. I am more concerned with the information/content/data than the presentation of same, though. Keep it simple. Keep it clean. As long as those two criteria are met then I don't really care.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
Those all sound more like good examples as to why nobody should ever use IE5.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Just a thought, but maybe these browsers didn't follow the guidelines which tell you what to do when things aren't recognised? If that was the case the fault lies on Microsoft, not W3C.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
If an important word in a sentence is bolded properly with plain markup tags, the author will have used <strong> or <b> and browsers without stylesheets will see it bold regardless.
This community should have been using CSS for years. Supporting W3C standards is very important.
CSS will make LDP more readable, for the moment I have to modify my browser windo to get the columns of text to the correct width. I also have to modify font size.
Two operations that would be made redundant by a good CSS.
A print style sheet would make printed output easier to read too.
realkiwi
They already write it in DocBook, dumb-dumb. ;-)
The question which is being asked, is when you convert it to HTML, should it be plain old boring HTML, or should it use CSS? IMO it should use CSS since the stylesheet for converting DocBook to HTML would be simpler.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Ever look at w3c's standards? They go through incredible lengths for visually disabled people. Not everyone can read the screen that you are looking at right this very second as well as you are.
The internet is a great encyclopedia of knowledge? For only the seeing? I think not!
The standards are there not only so that every (*program) can use it. They are also there for those that can not see/hear a computer program as well as you or I. If you are like me then spend a week using your computer *without your glasses*.
This is the parent poster. This is why he/she deserves a +5. Just take off your glasses.
Mod up, mothafugger! CSS makdes the web pretty for people who can see perfectly while retaining the friendlyness to us "blind as a bat without our glasses" types.
And, you wouldn't even need Slashdot to initiate an outgoing connection to get the custom stylesheet. You would only need all the pages to output the appropriate href in the link element, which could easily be to a different site.
In this fashion I could easily make a stylesheet which looks exactly like the company intranet, and those suckers who look at my screen would think I'm hard at work.
Of course why do this all on the server? Firefox lets you select the stylesheet on the client side. If it just put in the ability to select stylesheets other than those choices specified in the page, it could do exactly what we are talking about, without Slashdot having to do anything but use CSS.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Basic HTML pages don't seem to ever lock down text size (I'm not sure they even can - does anyone know?) and letting the page reach the width that the browser window is set to is a simple act of omission - just don't put a pixel width in any outer-level tables (assuming there are any tables), use percentages instead.
The very worst offending pages I run into all seem to be CSS-based; so while it certainly flexible, it is also a means by which pages can be made almost unusable. One of the reasons I prefer Mozilla Firefox is the ability to size text even on "locked" CSS pages (though I wish it could natively size images as well.) MS IE isn't nearly as friendly about this, though you can kind of hack it to work with the "Accessibility" settings. No big deal, I formatted my last XP system into a Linux machine a few weeks ago. :) But I still have to use IE at work, sometimes. The Windows Firefox isn't quite as clean. But I digress.
As you can probably tell, I'm a member of the crowd that thinks the user should always control the entire end presentation, and never, ever should the web site do so. The only thing that annoys me more than locked-format web pages are PDF pages, which are not only completely locked, they're overweight and massively sluggish compared to HTML - I have zero use for them.
So, as long as the CSS isn't used to enforce text size and/or width rules, I'm all for it.
But if either one of those capabilities goes away, for any reason, honestly, I'll probably stop visiting the site. My eyes are getting older a good deal faster than the rest of me is.
My .02
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
- Separate presentation from content
- Maintain stylistic consistency throughout the site
- Make the pages more lightweight and faster loading
- Simplify future design modification
- Meet accessibility guidelines
- Follow current web standards while allowing for 'graceful degradation' in older browsers
More information, as well as why of each of the above matters can be found here.Others have mentioned it, but I'd also highly recommend alistapart and Jeffrey Zeldman's Designing with Web Standards.
leave the content as-is. if you've really got a hard-on for CSS, add it to future docs, but leave the existing ones alone.
It doesn't matter who's fault it is -- Software is buggy, and CSS does not degrade. BTW, you see some of the same kinds of issues with old versions of Mozilla.
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
That's why I use cocoon to do the presentation. The backend can be however it wants to be, and the front can look nice. Cocoon also makes it easy to unify diverse sources, and deal with the large variety of browsers.
Using anything other than apache cocoon for this project is ridiculous.
Of course all the documents are/should be stored as DocBook, then the presentation layer can be handled automatically by cocoon. You could have a zillion options for output, for example:
It amazes me that people always assume that what is a "feature" for one person will always break something for another...
You could dual-boot your lovely G3 into either MacOS or Linux, whatever you want, unless, of course, you need MacOS booted all the time. In which case you should just buy another Mac.
OpenBoot is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Don't make us hurt you.
Allows for changing the look of thousands of pages accessing the same style sheet by editing a single file...
What is your malfunction? Eventough IE doesn't support other than the few most common CSS selector types and its box model depends on doctype declaration, it still is able to render the majority of style properties correctly.
SO, if the designer concentrates on creating the user interface instead of using all the different features of CSS for sake of the features themselves she might actually succeed on making usable, desirable and functional user interface.
Just my 0.02e.
Docbook has several conversion frontends, including plain text.
I think man_over mistyped. 5.2.3 is the most recent version for the Mac OS (X, anyway) I believe. 5.1.7 is the latest for OS9.
Don't use DocBook. That's a dead end. It continues the pernicious tradition that UNIX documentation doesn't have pictures.
CSS does NOT always degrade gracefully with HTML ... depending on how well the web developers handle it. If absolutely NO HTML presentation is specified at all, then the site does degrade. Whether that can be called graceful or not is a matter of opinion.
But once a site starts using even the slightest bit of presentation specification in HTML, then things get bad very quickly. For example if a background color is specified in a table cell, it might be in conflict with the default color used for say hyperlinks by the browser. So if the background color is specified, so must every affected font color.
Here is an example of a site, and how it looks in an older browser, where the developers claim they are using "web standards" to make a site, and it degrades horribly. Actually, I would call this site absolute crap. When I communicated with them about it, they simply claimed that it "meets federal accessibility standards". Technically, they are not actually doing web standards correctly. But the point is, there are too many webmasters who are idiots and can never get it right, so I have my doubts about promoting this concept.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Can't see the samples on the website (it seems to be overloaded or something)...
I support making it easier for users to access information. Using CSS will be a definite benefit to Linux help pages. Right now, the TLD docs are very basic (almost like a one big essay with no pictures, weak headings, etc.) If CSS can be used to make it easier to retrieve information, I would welcome it.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
The markup used for the LDP files is quite straigtforward and luckily stripped of any bloat like font tags and like, and as such I'm sympathetic to the idea of not getting involved with the presentation layer.
For most pages (ie. like /.) using CSS will greatly increase page load times when all the presentational deprecated markup is shed in favor of CSS. Much of the redundancy is gone after this treatment.
However, this is not the case with the LDP files as they are already stripped of any presentational information (*). Though, this is also an advantage in this case, as the markup then lends itself quite nicely to being used with CSS. It would still for the most part be for the eye-candy purposes (which is okay), and therefore my recommendation would be to provide the style sheets as alternate style sheets. People can choose one of the different looks if more style sheets are available, or by default stick to the tried and true look.
(*) However, when we already have this clear separation of content and presentation, it would still be possible for the doc writers to do their job like they're used to without worrying about presentation. And if I'm not mistaken, the documentation source is in docbook format - here they're not worrying about presentational stuff anyway. YMMV, of course.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
Second, getting different people to use the same style sheet on an open source project is tough. And if everybody has different style sheets, there's no point.
Third, unless everybody edits HTML with the same WYSIWYG editor, nobody will be able to use a WYSIWYG editor on the HTML. (Has anyone written an open-source Dreamweaver replacement yet?)
CSS, properly used, can and will degrade gracefully. Just take a look at the Css Zen Garden for example. The fault is not the technology but the fact that there are way too many clueless people running around calling themselves "webdesigners", when all they can is creating a template in Frontpage and make it look pretty.
We know who you are, Eugenia...
Let me guess, you've given up professional web design and you're now teaching web design at Bizzarro U. where everything is exactly the opposite of the real world.
Seriously, it sounds like you've been out of touch for a while. You might want to get in touch with the current state of the art. Start at CSSZenGarden.com (feel free to use Lynx if you like, it will only prove how wrong your assumptions are).
So, lynx supports bold and italic? Hmm, not on my terminal.. However, it will highlight (in my case, in purple) text between I or B tags.. As well as text between EM and STRONG tags. But EM (emphasis) and STRONG are semantic markups. Emphasized text doesn't have to be italic, and STRONG text doesn't have to be bold. It may as well be purple. Which is what my lynx does.
Shunning I and B just serves as a reminder to that (though you could in theory also override the italics and bold font properties of those tags using CSS if you in fact DO want purple text to show on your gee-whizz graphical browser; it just doesn't make sense semantically anymore).
Pray tell how lynx renders FONT FACE="Arial" though..
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Some of the Gentoo page is UNREADABLE. That is because it is attempting (well, succeeding) to change the background color in a table cell without changing the foreground color at the same time. The headings in the tables is where this problem is. Th background is dark blue and the foreground is black. What kind of silliness is that? This is NOT correct graceful degrading; it's screwed up. Of course the fix is easy ... put the necessary font color setting in there. So why are they not doing it? Or do they just not care about older browsers and the people that have damned good reasons to use them.
So in the end, TLDP is more readable to many people.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The gentoo page spills for me, too. The TLDP page does not. That can't possibly be the same. Just because it might render the same for you doesn't mean it has to for everyone. But if it renders differently even for just a few, then there is at least something different that TLDP did better than gentoo.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
It's important that the presentation layer be kept separate, and that the unformatted documents remain available, otherwise the tastes of the formatters will be imposed upon the reader. It would make sense if the LDP hosted at least one, but maybe more, formatting projects, but that these remain separated from the content production process.
Subject says it all
Set up / define standard tag attributes and ask everybody involved to use them from now on. It should be more than 20 or 30 css classes. Keep the classes empty. Then let the designers lose on the styles.
Don't, I repeat: DON'T waste a single second on CSS design. There are people who can to that better than any OSS admin. Trust me on that one.
I personally think it would be cool to have a set of styles to switch. Imagine LDP docs fitting your desktop theme. Which would be no problem if I had a set of classes I knew I could trust to be applied allready.:-)
Bottom line:
If you use CSS as it is intended, this will be no problem whatsoever. I actually don't quite understand why you're asking the question anyway.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
After that, Paw made it smell again.
It was putrid, a hot cloud of horrible sulphur diarrhea-smell, worse than you can imagine.
Paw stood proudly, his thumbs latched under the straps of his overalls.
"Paw," I said, after some time, "I think it's time you made me another baby." I pulled off my tubetop. "Let's go out behind the shitpile."
I am not at all a CSS expert, but it sounds to me like what's being proposed is the stripping out of any marking and formatting that can be and is useful when viewed with a browser, say lynx, that doesn't support CSS.
No, you haven't got it. The idea is to make the formatting flow naturally from the structure. Take one simple example: suppose in your document you have no headings and instead you have just dropped in in a FONT tag to make them large and bold. If you have a text mode browser that, for example, underlines headings, it won't be able to do anything sensible with the FONT tag. If there were a proper heading there with the CSS saying large and bold, the text mode browser could just ignore it and do its underlining thing.
Sure, you can write junk HTML by littering the document with <SPAN STYLE="whatever">. That's horrible, and not what CSS is supposed to be about.
I think applying CSS would be a good thing. Perhaps even have a number of different stylesheets available, that a user could pick - one for on screen reading, one for print, etc etc. Naturally, other transformations of the original docbook sources (to PDFs for example) should be made available on the TLDP site ...
-- Manik Surtani
Stylesheets don't make your site look better any more than buying an expensive camera makes you take better pictures.
As much as the geek in me would like to think that appearance is something you just slap on after the fact, the truth is that creating a simple visually pleasant and easy to use interface is a very complicated thing. You wouldn't trust a designer to write C, but you trust a developer to build a user interface?
The problem with the LDP site is not that it doesn't use stylesheets. The problems are that it uses a horrid color scheme, bad fonts, and cryptic navigation. Sure, with stylesheets I could reconfigure my browser or make my own user stylesheet, but why make me the user go through so much trouble just to have something that looks even mildly professional?
A choice of masters is not freedom
don't fix it. ;)
Although I only learned about it from other comments for this article, it seams LDP only takes documents in DocBook format, which is some kind of SGML/XML thingy that you have to specifically learn and that is not supported by commonly used word processors like OpenOffice and (gasp) Word.
Let's say I develop a worthwhile Linux project and even write comprehensive, readable documentation - as a text file created in XEmacs. Would you a) ask me to learn some weird language with a lot of angular brackets and not include my stuff at all if I don't have time, motivation or ability, b) ask other people to convert my doc and re-convert every time I do a minor fix to it or c) develop tools that make the most of the format that I provided?
I think the answer is obvious. Look at how many non-technical people are using google or search.msn.com and manage to find exactly what they are looking for. Develop similar tools for Linux documentation that try to select and present the information the user wants based on hieristics, language-aware semantic analysis and so on. Then, give developers a system of simple-to-use hints that work with text, OpenOffice, manpages, info pages, HTML - any format in wide use.
Otherwise LDP will end up as a perfectly formatted, but incomplete or out-of-date set of documents. I think we all would rather read manpages.
While everyone here seems to be debating presentation vs content the reason *I* have been hassling my company to start making heavy use of CSS is to comply with legislation to make our sites more accessible!!
Having had them switch to XHTML-1 transitional (heheh cant wait to drop strict on them) and attempting to ENFORCE validation, CSS is the ONLY way to retain a high level of presentational impact while still meeting our legal requirements.
Basically if you do ANY web development work professionally and you dont use or plan on using CSS then expect to find yourself working less and less as your clients get sued because of how incompetently you ply your trade.
The general attitude of not caring about the layout, and just putting in the content, leads to pages which have far tooo long lines in typical browser windows (I thought that latex had spread the news that lines should not have more than 66-68 letters), have the ugly "ul" lists as the main structural ingredient, and makes the whole site (there's actually quite a lot of content there) pretty hard to navigate.
But I am pretty sure that they support lynx well, yeah. Don't want to troll, but I think Linus Torvalds' quote recommending to print out the GNU coding standards just once (so that you can burn them) applies to their Web Site Guidelines equally well. It should be time that the 90s and the news that a well-layoutet presentation actually helps to communicate the content (instead of "just distracting from it") reaches every web site author out there, even if he only uses emacs on console for his daily work.
Hmm, I think the line drawn between presentation and content is a fuzzy one, or at least drawn in the wrong place. If the "presentation" helps organize the "content" in a more understandable fashion, then perhaps the presentation actually contains content. I mean, are paragraphs, table of contents, indents and other things presentation or content? You could argue that they are presentation, but they're usually contained within the content.
Anyway, disregarding the previous paragraph, any graphic designer you speak to would disagree on the implied lowliness everyone here is attaching to presentation. All you nerdlingers know is 0s and 1s, but the whole world is much more than that. It's actually mostly presentation... Next time you're in bed with a chick, instead of fucking her, why don't you just say "insertpenis()", "while (time 30 seconds) { move penis in and out }", "ejaculate". It is about the content, and not the whole experience, right?
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
If someone can put together a CSS that provides a readable format without distractions (color schemes, backgrounds, images) then that might be OK.
However, if anyone on LDP is trying to deliver content and starts getting caught up in some pissing match about visual delivery effectiveness and tying up resources to come up with the most effectively marketing targeted CSS format then they should be fucking killed with extreme prejudice.
The one thing this world does not need is more eye-candy at the expense of content. We have enough of that in America already that we're a joke.
Then, for some reason, I had to use CSS for something. And it was a revelation.
When you use <FONT> tags, you have to choose a colour, a typeface and a size with each one -- not a big deal, you think. But eventually you've got a huge massive thing likeThen you decide that the dates would look better in green than blue
Whereas if you'd writtenthan you wouldn't have that problem, because you can just edit the style definition for "pastdate" in one place. Just like using functions.
The HTML and CSS standards are quite clear -- and if some manufacturer (*cough* Microsoft *cough) has their head so far up their arse that they can't follow them, it's SOFP.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I *am* a linux user so I don't read documentation, you insensitive clod...
Mozilla's "zoom" feature helps this somewhat, but it still makes pages made with this CSS more trouble to read than they would be otherwise. It is a pain in the ass to have to edit the CSS before you can read a page comfortably. [Thanks, Jesse, for the bookmarklets to do that, http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/]
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
Why not create an XML schema for documentation, then use something like XSLT or XQuery (implemented in Qexo, part of GNU Kawa) to create valid XHTML (or plain HTML, plain text and others...)? This future proofs against any new web paradigm and gives complete separation of design from content.
Using CSS is *so* obviously a good idea that I'm surprised it's even being questioned. Reasons for CSS:
1. Simple - I could probably write an acceptable basic CSS layout in an hour or less.
2. Reduced size - I recently re-wrote a (fairly small) website to CSS and the reduction was astonishing.
3. Logical seperation - Since I've rewritten this website it's been much easier to make changes to both presentation and content because you only need to think about one or the other not two things at the same time.
4. Portability - CSS is better for those viewing documents on mobile phones, PDA's, and other obscure hardware (Macs?)
5. Multiple layouts - write a stylesheet for readers or printing and it's automatically applied appropriately for you.
6. Customisation - don't like the way a documents laid out? - write a stylesheet of your own, use a decent browser and it'll apply your personal stylesheet instead of the authors.
Of course there are probably other advantages I've missed.
Disadvantages:
1. You have to strip all the formatting crap out of existing documents and restructure them in a sensible way. I have discovered this is a non-trivial task (somewhat to my surprise).
Who is arguing against CSS, I'd be very interested to know what reasons they have for opposing it - they must be drawbacks I haven't picked up on.
There is no reason for there not to be css for the LDP, unless the reason is that the same people responsible for the content want or think they should be the same people who provide the presentation. Otherwise, let someone else, likely more talented in the presentation arena, be responsible for it; give someone else with a diferent talent a chance to contribute and give back to a community that has possibly helped them.
For that matter, why not make a contest out it?
shouldn't they write some documentation first?
I don't see what the problem is. the LDP uses DocBook to mark up the documents, not HTML. CSS is simply an implementation details of the templates used for HTML output.
Using CSS is a good idea, but it shouldn't and doesn't have event the slightest relevance to the people writing documentation.
I don't like trolls and mod against me if you like, but I'd prefer if you'd reply.
OK, you might very well be right. But please, please, please report your findings to TLDP, there is, you know, a FEEDBACK for exactly this thing.
TLDP needs your comments to improve.
Normally I wouldn't post a reply to something like this, but the whole shitty, breakable design that is so much of the web is in large part due to supporting pathetically old and broken browsers and proprietary extensions. NS 4 anyone?
/*/*/ (ns4 sees this as two open comments delimiters and a slash, while standards-compliant browsers interpret this as open comments, slash, close comments)
Actually, there are several workarounds to completely hide your css from netscape 4. One is to link to your stylesheet using media="all". Another is to prepend any styles you want ns4 to ignore with
That way netscape users get a functional (albeit ugly) webpage, and you don't need to bend over backwards to make things work both in ns4 and newer browsers.
The coolest thing about css for me is that the order of items in your page becomes arbitrary. I tend to start with the content first, and the navigation elements last. That way if you save the html, or browse through lynx, you get the content right at the top of the page, but if you visit it on the website with a regular browser, the css puts the navigation first.
I understand and embrace the notion of separating content from presentation, but at some level you have to be aware of presentation as a content author. The way a document looks has a direct influence on the reception of the content.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
It's real documentation if the font isn't in classic TNR, using solid white for the background, blue for hyperlinks... and graphics? Pffft, who needs graphics?
Always look on the briight side of life! (whistle, whistle)
Flamebait? Hardly. Not all the world revolves around IE, and not everything in the CSS spec has to be employed.
Even if the basic stuff as used, stuff that even Nav4 supports properly, it'd lead to an improvement in the aesthetics of the documents.
Not only that, but it'd mean that seperate stylesheets could be used for display and print; though old browsers like Nav4 can't cope with that, even IE4 can. When it come to Konq, Opera, and Mozilla, they support multiple stylesheets without any difficulty.
I don't like trolls and mod against me if you like, but I'd prefer if you'd reply.
Here is an example of a site, and how it looks in an older browser, where the developers claim they are using "web standards" to make a site, and it degrades horribly.
That site uses tables to layout non-tabular content, which is a big css no-no. It also does not validate. Validating is part one of being standards compliant. Following the basic rules of how to appropriately use css is part two. Complying with all the tips from dive into accessibility is part three.
Correctly designed, by someone who knows what they're doing, a css-based site will always degrade gracefully. Always.
I've been to the LDP web site and have looked around at some of the documentation they've got there, and I appreciate what they're trying to do, but really, a lot of stuff on there is quite outdated. Many of the HOWTOs are a few years old and aren't really relevant. Maybe instead of looking at CSS to improve the presentation, they should improve the actual content...
CSS doesn't "degrade"? What do you even mean by that? I've built any number of sites that look pixel-perfect in "modern" browsers, looks slightly styled and readable in NS4 and look gorgeous in Lynx. CSS isn't supposed to degrade in the sense of millions of colors to 256 to 16 to 4; it allows you to present content in different ways to different user agents. One of those different ways is with no styles at all.
But the only thing 'bad' about style sheets is that you won't be able to support Netscape 4.7/4.8 anymore. Oh no! Actually, the netscape that installs with Solaris 8 and 9 gets so foobar'd by style sheets, well you have to see it to understand. But hey, it is 2004. I think we can handle them by now.
"Other bands play, but Manowar KILLS"
Even though I feel that CSS is not that important, it's a nice thing, the time wasted on discussing this could have been spent on deploying the CSS.
Not essential, but nice.
It's not like CSS isn't being used in OSS allready. Mozilla handles it flawlessly so I see no reason not to use it on LDP. Just my vote for the poll as it were.
Kleedrac
Sure we wang, can.
*groan*
.rtf and Braille.
Docbook already does this. Want print? Docbook exports to PDF, TeX, and PS. Want screen? There's HTML. Want light? There's text. You can also output to
CSS shouldn't be used to make something printable, but it should be used to enhance the screen output.
I see your point. But if a designer settles on Docbook--and does it right--then they might as well still attach good CSS for the HTML output. Users may want to simply click print in their browser while looking at HTML that was generated from a Docbook format doc.
CSS can and should be used to enhance screen output, braille output, screen-reader output, print output. The spec is specifically designed to style multiple media. That doesn't exclude generating from Docbook (or any sort of data format a developer cooks up), but CSS is pretty well supported already and the support is improving across all sorts of user agents, so it's a smart way to do those things, even if you are also generating TeX and PDF and everything else. Users deserve the choice, and CSS is a well designed spec for offering those choices.
Online citizen journalism from the inner city: The View From The Ground
I love open source software. I use it everyday and wouldn't want to use anything else. BUT, I think that free speech can be too much of a good thing sometimes. Case in point. Let's argue about how to make a website better, instead of actually making it better. Everyone gets a voice, but because everyone is talking, nothing gets done. Just do it one way or the other. People, get over it.
You have finished a CSS file, correct? Save it for the end of the initial project phase and implement then. Any subsequent changes or additions will have to take into account that a CSS is in use and adjust.
Be prepared to recode pages that are made early on and don't have the CSS tags though.
My main gripe with css is that web sites using them have the property them to force their preferred font size on me.
I usually increasze font size. I cant read those microscopic fonts some artsy types seem to prefer.
My advice the the LDP folks would be - stay away from them.
But if a designer settles on Docbook--and does it right--then they might as well still attach good CSS for the HTML output.
No disagreement there. The LDP (which I've been working with for something like 8 years) has done a pretty good job with Docbook so far. I don't write HTML, but the CSS examples elsewhere shows it has real potential.
CSS can and should be used to enhance screen output, braille output, screen-reader output, print output.
But CSS only helps if you're using HTML as an intermediary step. Docbook already has something similar to CSS (called just "stylesheets") and the LDP has their own version of stylesheets already, depending on the output method. So in a way, we're already using CSS, just under a different name and skipping the HTML step.
Making it look nice is a symptom of professionalism. Even if an interface is fully functional, making it LOOK fully functional, rather than thrown-together late at night, is V. important to customers. In the case of FOSS the customers is us, and we need to support us in the way we would like to be accustomed to.
IS that clear?
I thot so.
I'm in favor of professional-looking documents, interfaces, CUPS GUIs and everything...
Thanks for watching!
...a one-big-html, or a pdf version of the documment I am looking for, I don't get pop-xxxxxx's, and the page loads quickly, I don't really care what the underlying tech is for that particular site.
(Stolen sig) Remember: it's a "Microsoft virus", not an "email virus", a "Microsoft worm", not a "computer worm
The current numbers are about 2-3% which may not seem all that big of a difference, but that's very close to Mac OS's market share. Many predict linux on the desktop will hit 5-6% within the year which would pass Mac OS.
No CSS, HTML, XML, or salt, just plain text.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
It's a shame that these big companies don't conform to standards. Standards are what make the internet work.
Opera Watch - An Opera browser blog.
CSS is the way your content should be presented. I so wish the W3C created mandates rather than recommendations. The reason why we have to use CSS hacks and browser detection is that the W3C never dictates that something must be implemented exactly this way in order for your piece of software to be called a Web browser. If this were the case, Microsoft would have a *long* way to go before IE would even be considered. Granted all of the others would have work to do, but all of the other modern browsers are closer to standards compliance than IE.
"Complexity is the enemy of reliability" -- AR
I need to be able to print out LDP howtos on ancient tractor-fed printers (that only know ASCII and some obsolete undocumented proprietary crap) and then hand-carry the printouts into secure non-web-attached facilities in order to convert those facilities into modern research labs.
ASCII text rules. Long live ROFF!
Some of the browsers available for mobile devices do not support CSS. The AvantGo browser which is quite popular supports style tags in some elements in the enterprise version. It does not support external or embedded stylesheets though.
I vote yes.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Anyone who takes the time to look into browser compliance with CSS would know that Mac IE 5.x was the most compliant browser when it was released, and Win IE 6 still doesn't come close.
There are tables showing which browsers support which features, but I can't remember where. Win IE just sucks really hard.
Sorry to burst your IE-loving bubbles.
My vote would be to leave LDP exactly as it is: readable, informative and old-school - just like a man page.
The technology, or its documentation, or its promotion, is at fault when lots of people use it wrong.
If the technology is hard to use then the technology is at fault. For example, a lot of the problems I see are where specific table cells have a specific background color. I don't know that CSS can even specify that, and so maybe it has to be done in HTML, which in turn forces font colors to be done in HTML, too.
Absolutely none of the CSS promoting sites say anything about how to specifically deal with this problem, or with any other specific problem. They describe CSS, tell people it should be used, list the benefits, then leave people hanging with little more than some reference documentation and examples on a few pages that are relevant to real world problems.
Fix that ... e.g. make documentation better ... and maybe things will work out. Now all I need is a decent, reliable, and non-obese browser, that does handle CSS correctly (Netscape 4 doesn't fit the latter requirement, and Mozilla Firebird doesn't fit the former requirement).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I will now repeat this for those of you who think that body {font-size : 90%;} is a good idea:
DON'T FUCK WITH THE DEFAULT BODY TEXT SIZE ON EVERYONE'S SCREEN IN ORDER TO AVOID SETTING THE SIZE YOU LIKE AS YOUR LOCAL DEFAULT. AT BEST THAT WILL CAUSE READERS TO DISABLE YOUR STUPID, ANNOYING MARKUP; AT WORST THEY WILL AVOID THE SITE. REDUCED FONT SIZES SHOULD BE USED, LIKE SMALL PRINT EVERYWHERE, FOR THINGS YOU WOULD JUST AS SOON FOLKS DIDN'T READ.
This free clue has been brought to you by people who like to read text on the web. Forcing your personal preference in font family for running text is a lesser disrespect, but here again, do you really think we're all so stupid as to have a default font chosen that we find less pleasant to read than your favorite du jour?
However, using tables for layout is still technically compliant with the standards that specify the table tags. But it's just HTML compliant. The catch with CSS is that the level of "gracefully" degrading isn't satisfactory to lots of people, especially people who come from graphical media like print or video where they have always had explicit control. The only way to overcome this is to do a whole lot better job in two areas. The first is to promote CSS a lot better and more strongly include the requirement to not do the things in HTML that break sites that use CSS. And the other area is to promote better browsers that support CSS correctly, and are not obese. Just because you might have 2 gigabytes of RAM to run Mozilla or whatever does not mean everyone else does. I still have to use Netscape 4 because of these limitations, and some of my friends have even smaller computers than I do. CSS is broken in Netscape 4 and has to be left turned off. I do use Firebird occaisionally, but I can't use it regularly due to the bloat and quite many other bugs (including a form submission security bug). Maybe some day someone with real systems understanding will decide to put together a truly smart modular browser that won't bloat itself beyond what the current web sites it's viewing will need. I can give specific advice, but I won't except directly to the lead developers (because it is a bit complex and would require some back and forth discussion to make sure it is conveyed correctly).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I'm an Open Source documentation volunteer. My experience in the trenches reveals this: In order for technical documentation to be usable, it must be clear, complete, correct, and current.
Usable documentation then becomes great if it is also consistent. It's frustrating to see Open Source documentation projects like the LDP spending so much time on consistency when they haven't reached usability yet. Getting there is hard work, I know.
Ahh, but you still needed to test it. When you can write some CSS and automatically know that it won't fuckup/crash Netscape 4, then you'd have a point.
The text of this post says that most Slashdot users are Linux users. Is that actually true?
I was going to make this exact point. I know plenty of people who are more Windows users than anything, but check out /. for the other geek news content. I mean, the P2P clients on Linux are not all that great, but every RIAA/MP3/filesharing story seems to generate plenty of controversy. I'm betting most of those people do their filesharing in Windows. And probably use Windows Media Player to listen to their tracks, arr.
Or just don't pass anything to NS4 by hiding all of your CSS (instead of just most of it) using the "@import" statement. Voila: all text. No choking.
The original idea behind HTML was to let the author control content, and the viewer control the actual display according to their own hardware and preferences. Style sheets were an attempt by authors to control not only content, but presentation as well. I leave it to the reader to decide which major company feels that you should only see things the way they want you to. (Hint: "Where do you think you're going today?") More often than not the style sheet causes those of us who use computers as tools (and so don't need to upgrade every month, and have no need of more than, say, 800x600) to look at seriously malformed pages. If you want to make them DOCs, then make them DOCS. If you leave them as HTML they look great, but given the choice between stylesheets and vanilla text I will take vanilla text.
Dude, now it's score is "-1, Insightful"!
That's gotta be worth a cool +10,000,000 points by your scale.
The ultimate plays for Madden 2006
This is not always the case. Not that many people use it anymore, but 4.x versions of Netscape will seriously mangle some pages using valid and correct X/HTML and CSS.
I hate seeing market share go to IE, but the old Netscape fading into the past is probably one of the best things to happen for the future of good web design.
The ultimate plays for Madden 2006
As a logged in user, you can select a [lighter] version of /. made specifically for cases such as yours.
/* Slashdot.org */
;
/* headings. Formerly H2,H3 */
Oh, it gets even better. If you use my personal StyleSheet you can make the lighter slashdot taste delicious. For Opera users, this is a very simple task of clicking an icon, but IE and Mozilla have managed to make using/overriding with user Styles cumbersome. That's why most people don't realize the power they offer.
body{font-family:arial narrow,arial,sans-serif;}
h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {
color:white;
background:#006666;
margin:0%;
font-family:arial,sans-serif;}
h1 a,h2 a,h3 a,h4 a,h5 a,h6 a{
color:#CCCCCC;}
ul,ol{border:thin solid gray}
li{margin:0;}
i,em,cite,dfn,var{
color:maroon;}
b,strong{color:navy;
font-family:arial,sans-serif;}
tt{font-family:"Andale Mono",monospace;}
/* Small fonts */
blockquote{color:#300;
background:#cdc;
font-family:verdana,tahoma,"Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;
font-size:10px;
margin:1em 3em;
padding:3px}
img{font-family:verdana,sans-serif
font-size:9px;
border:thin solid #933;}
a[name] b{display:block;
color:white;
background:#006666;
margin:0%;
font-family:arial,sans-serif;}
a{text-decoration:none;
border-bottom:thin solid blue;}
a:hover{color:navy;
border-bottom:thin solid navy;}
td{background:#aaa;}
td + td{background:#bbb;}
dt{background:#CCCC99;}
No, non-CSS presentation hints have a specificity of zero, and so should never take precedence over stylesheets.
We're talking about the programmatic addition of <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="common.css"/> so that all pages share the same look and feel. In addition, by changing "common.css" (or whatever it is named), all pages get the facelift without having to regenerate all of the HTML from content source.
Another issue at hand is division of labor. Those who would actually be good at page layout are almost never the same people that you want to update the XFree86 and ALSA HOWTOs. People who can hack code are not often as adept at making web pages attractive and appealing and vice versa. Work on the one does not necessarily mean less work on the other. There are two distict groups of people at work here who have a limited capacity for helping each other.
Ahhh... I see now. You have no idea what you are talking about. Now now. Before you get all indignant about me calling you ignorant Mr. Grand Almighty FreeBSD User, let me reiterate something for everyone to hear.
Listen closely as this is important: CSS != XSLT. The HTML transformation method doesn't matter at all. Not one bit. Of course the output HTML should be semantically rich, but the CSS is applied on top of this. The HTML layer should have absolutely no knowledge of the CSS except for the extra link tag.
It is just a browser rendering issue, not a content generation issue.
Case in point, print stylesheets would be a great boon as the printed stock has different needs/constraints from the display version. If you were to do this directly with DocBook-XSL, you would ultimately end up having to make special "print" versions of the stylesheets. I'm not talking about PDF generation however useful that may be. I'm saying that when you hit print in the browser, all of the links display the URL next to it, the navigation bar links are removed, etc. In other words, nice print stock from HTML.
And all by just changing a CSS file or two. All of this without touching or regenerating the content.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
It is unfortunately necessary sometimes. If you use certain CSS directives, NS4 will crash. To avoid this, it is common to use @import because NS4 doesn't understand it. Case in point:
<style type="text/css" title="foo">@import url("my.css")</style>
This gives the ability to switch stylesheets while still hiding from NS4. Personally I prefer the media="all" hack:
<link rel="stylesheet" title="foo" type="text/css" media="all" href="my.css"/>
NS4 only understands media="screen" and therefore ignores this tag/style. But anyway, addition a "title" attribute to the link/style tag will allow easy stylesheet overrides like you were looking for. Of course, I advocate using parts of CSS2 since >90% of the browsers out there support at least rudimentary positioning like floats and absolutes. Support (or lack of support) for CSS2 selectors can be adequately used to distinguish which browser styles to use.
That said, it's better to simply make your stylesheets so that people can use the browser facilities to change font sizes instead of hard-coding the font sizes in the stylesheet. All popular browsers support font size alteration and this support is not page-specific. It's simply up to CSS authors to avoid disabling this functionality. Hint: don't use pixel values for font size.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
It's called HTTP 1.1 and persistent connections. Every popular browser supports it.
A new connection isn't made, it simply executes a new GET request in the already opened socket. In addition, most browsers support gzip compression of content. CSS compresses very well -- a whole lot of repetitive info. Any popular web server released in the last five years will do the former. Enabling mod_gzip or mod_deflate will do the latter.
Persistent connection + gzip compression = all referenced stylesheets downloaded at once very efficiently.
And of course since CSS doesn't change all that often, the last modified header will keep the browser from downloading it over and over. In addition, a site maintainer could set the Expires header for all CSS. Then your CSS is only grabed once and the browser never even bothers to ask again for a refresh until the expiry elapses.
Ain't technology wonderful?
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
While all of the CSS stylesheets are downloaded, Firefox doesn't necessarily download all of the referenced images at the same time. Firefox must load all of the stylesheets so that when you switch the stylesheets, you are actually switching to something. If a particular CSS request returns a "404: Not found", that stylesheet is removed from your list of available styles.
As an exercise, go to CSS Zen Garden, and flip through the skins. After a new page has fully loaded (no more throbber activity), scroll down quickly to the bottom. You'll notice that some images fill in after you scroll to them. It's called lazy loading. It's just for people like you.
As for "massive bandwidth", I think you overstate the issue. A massive CSS document is 30KB. Mine are usually 10KB or less. Most images in the HTML are bigger than this. Remember that CSS is probably being served directly from the filesystem and therefore the server gives a Last-Modified header. If the CSS on the server isn't newer than the cached copy, the browser doesn't download it again -- just like any other static files. (Google for the HTTP header "If-Modified-Since") Also, if the server sets an Expires header, the browser won't even try the request until the expiry timestamp is passed by.
With HTTP 1.1 persistent connections (used by default by all of the major browsers and servers), and there's only ever one connection with multiple GETs. Coupled with mod_gzip or mod_deflate (or equivalent) on your server, you get very small items going over the wire. My 7,281 byte base CSS file compresses down to 1,779 bytes with standard gzip compression.
And finally note that without CSS, your HTML is full of tables, font tags, bold tags, italic tags, center tags, bgcolor attributes, spacer GIFs, etc. That's where massive bandwidth usage comes from. At least the CSS stylesheet can be reused. <b> tags only replicate.
CSS is not your enemy.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.