Friday, May 21, 2004

java.net: Cascading Style Sheets Have Taken Root [May 21, 2004]

Interesting take on CSS from a Java programmer point-of-view.
We cannot change the html markup language but it has become flexible enough such that content publishers can now get around the issue of semantic content by applying "class" and "id" attributes to tags. What publishers end up doing is tagging a div with an id such as "sidebar." As far as I'm concerned, this is equivalent to having a <sidebar> tag. Suddenly combining markup with css stylesheets becomes a task more akin to writing content using a specialized markup language such as docbook. The difference of course is that the rules are completely informal; they're invented by the content developer.

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