[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
Hi Simon
Simon said:
The places where the cascade gets tricky tend to be places which reflect
the politics of web design - who has control over final presentation? In
my experience, graphic designers want control over all presentation and
hate being overruled, so the W3C gave them !important rules. Users
frequently hate dealing with what graphic designers give them, so they want
to override the graphic designer's rules, and battles of !important rules
ensue. In CSS1 the designer ("author") would win in conflicts of
!important, while in CSS2 (wisely, in my view) the user would win.
Didier replies:
Very good point.
May I add that in addition to the obvious political factor of who owns the
document - the document's reader or the author? We should also include the
notion of completeness, does the layout is part of the document? Does the
layout express the non verbal nature of the document? Thus, add to the
political and communication factors, the commercial dimension or in other
words "who pays the bill". CSS can be a great tool to suppress ads but we
are left with the problem of "who pays the bill" if users can remove all ads
from a document. As a direct commercial impact of CSS, I see a raise of the
cost of accessing information since, it would no longer be a third party who
would pay in total or in parts a published document. Even printed magazines
include ads to reduce their retail price. Hence, the magazine's content is
partially paid by the reader and partially paid by advertisers. Suppress the
capacity to advertise or reduce its potential visibility (i.e. the certainty
that the ready will - at least- get it in its visual environment) and you
subito facto raised the cost of access to information.
In conclusion, I would say that the biggest impact cascading style sheets
would have is economical. Also, restricting access to information by
increasing the cost of access may also lead to other probably disastrous
societal effects by restricting the access to knowledge.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Didier PH Martin http://didier-martin.com
OpenJade Project http://dsssl.netfolder.com
Coming soon.... http://xml.netfolder.com
Coming soon.... http://blog.didier-martin.com
-------------------------------------------------------------
|
