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This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C

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Re: This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C

#71
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fixed left column. Liquid center column Fixed right column. The whole point of CSS is to take things like width="200px" out of the markup.

>The whole point of CSS is to take things like width="200px" out of the markup. I don't see how that's really an improvement in this particular case. In fact, I would say that using 'width="200px"' inline may actually be more readily understandable and maintainable than having the style defined somewhere else and then used only once. (I'm assuming that the 'width="200px"' is not duplicated multiple times in the PHP/P…

The example is contrived because there is no content in the table cells. In the real world there will be some content, and suddenly your "width"-attributes are many lines apart and not nicely aligned. This makes is a mess to maintain, because there is no single place where your layout is defined; the information is spread all over the document, mixed with other kinds of information.

Furthermore, separating style info into a style sheet allows you to adapt the style for different devices.

Re: This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C

#72
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PS: tables are still bad. Tables are not bad . CSS purists state that using table markup purely for layout purposes (e.g. for positioning a page footer) is bad, because it violates the separation between content and presentation. In that case display:table-* will give you the same layout (neither worse nor better!) but without requiring any specific markup in the html. But this poses a dilemma for web developers, b…

I think you're misremembering history. It's not bad because 'it violates the separation between content and presentation', it's bad because you end up with tag soup. The table's demise was purely that it was too hard to maintain in anything more than a trivial layout. When you started getting down to your third nested table it was a friggin' nightmare. Also cells and rows had weird quirks as well as missing propertie…

But I think we agree. Layouts with nested tables are hard to maintain because presentational concerns (like the attributes which defines cell sizes) is spread all over the document and intermingled with the content. It's a mess.

Re: This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C

#73
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, to make it _really_ simple: 1 2 3 div.column { margin: 10px; width: 200px; float: left; } EDIT: Missed the key constraint, resizable center column. What I have above won't work for that, but shows that replacing tables isn't very difficult.

Nope, not quite. Resize your window to less than 600px and see what happens.

You can wrap the above in another div with a width of 660px or greater and it'll have the same effect as a table if the window width is less than the width of the columns (plus margins/padding).

Re: This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C

#74

The W3C is broken: it has spent the last 10 years standardizing ideas instead of existing practice . This is totally backwards and leads to standards that are too complicated, unrealistic, and in many cases not needed at all. The W3C was originally created to standardize HTML, which was already being used by many vendors and users but in incompatible ways. That is exactly the right situation for creating a standard.…

The W3C is broken: it has spent the last 10 years standardizing ideas instead of existing practice. This is totally backwards and leads to standards that are too complicated, unrealistic, and in many cases not needed at all. The general view of the W3C as a standards body is broken. The W3C gets companies and individuals together to hash out ideas for the Web. After some time and trial and error they assemble a recom…

AFAIK, HTML has been standardized by the ISO based on the W3C HTML 4 recommendation.

Re: This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C

#75
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The W3C is broken: it has spent the last 10 years standardizing ideas instead of existing practice. This is totally backwards and leads to standards that are too complicated, unrealistic, and in many cases not needed at all. The general view of the W3C as a standards body is broken. The W3C gets companies and individuals together to hash out ideas for the Web. After some time and trial and error they assemble a recom…

AFAIK, HTML has been standardized by the ISO based on the W3C HTML 4 recommendation.

Indeed!

http://www.scss.tcd.ie/misc/15445/15445.HTML

Re: This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked into CSS tables a bit more, and this seems to be how you'd write the above: .table { display: table; width: 100%; } .tr { display: table-row; } .left-column { display: table-cell; width: 200px; } .middle-column { display: table-cell; } .right-column { display: table-cell; width: 200px; } Fixed left column. Liquid center column. Fixed right column. This is definitely a huge improvement over the CSS box model.…

That's so much more verbose than using tables. What do you gain?

Regarding verbosity: In any real wold page, you would have some additional css properties, so the overhead with defining classes and referencing them in css would be there anyway. So the verbosity advantage of html tables is down to "tr" being shorter that "display: table-row". That is not really a serious objection.

Btw., if you don't want a seperate stylesheet, you can embed the css style information directly in the html:

    
      Fixed left column.
      Liquid center column.
      Fixed right column.
    
This quickly becomes an unmaintainable mess but if you really want, you can do it.

Re: This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C

#77
post #47

Flash supports peer-to-peer communication since Flash Player 10 using RTMFP (Real Time Media Flow Protocol).

Isn't that still in beta?

No, in fact it's been available in FP10 since October 2008.
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