Re: CXS page (fy: (Mis)Naming a Language)

On Sat, Oct 30, 2004 at 05:39:04PM -0700, Jonathyn Bet'nct wrote:
> On Saturday, October 30, 2004, at 04:54  PM, Mark J. Reed wrote:
> >Doing so via the <font> tag is especially wrong, since it no longer
> >exists in standard HTML. :)
>
> YES IT DOES! It may not exist in HTML 4.0, but screw HTML 4.0!
Nice attitude.

> The Internet bureaucrats have been screwing us over by taking out FONT
> and EMBED and these other things that have been around for ages, and
> I've had it! I'm using FONT if you want me to or not!
Well, fine, good for you.  It will no doubt continue to work forever,
but it's nevertheless built on a faulty presumption: that it makes sense
for HTML markup to include presentation instructions.  This was not the
goal of the HTML design, but a side effect of the browser wars, where
Netscape and Microsoft added elements to HTML left and right to try and
convince more page authors to design specifically for their browser and
thereby get more people to use it.

HTML is supposed to be browser-neutral.  Even if you assume that
everybody in the world who browses the web on a computer is using IE on
Windows - which while not true, is true to a high degree of
approximation  - you still have people browsing the web on PalmPilots,
cell phones, etc.  Plus you have people who are visually impaired who
therefore either don't care about fonts at all because they can't see
them, or very much care about fonts because they can only read certain
ones.

Presenting the document in an appropriate way for the user is the
browser's job, not the page author's, and when the page author tries to
do the browser's job it usually makes the browser's job harder, not
easier.

As for <embed>, that was never in standard HTML at all; it was always an
IE-specific element.  Since its usual use is ActiveX controls, that's
not much of a hardship, of course; if you're using ActiveX controls in
your page, you've already decided to throw compatibility out the window.

Finally, I disagree with the premise that CSS is harder than HTML.  It's
different, but not harder.  It actually makes a lot of things easier.  I
mean, if I'm going to specify a font for my page, I'd rather do it once
rather than many, many times with multiple <font> tags all over the
place.

-Marcos

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