Next wrote:

So you know XUL, the GUI framework of the Mozilla project?
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xul/

Of course limited to Mozilla browsers...


--
Benjamin Niemann
Email: pink at odahoda dot de
WWW: http://www.odahoda.de/

in message <4puke3-i9t.ln1@ophelia.g5n.co.uk>, Toby Inkster
('usenet200603@tobyinkster.co.uk') wrote:

/No-one/ wants PDF. /Ever/. There is never any good reason for using it.

Tightly controlled page format has no place on a world wide web where the
range of display devices - and the range of visual acuity of users - is
unconstrained and unlimited. If you want tightly controlled page format,
print it on vellum and send it by pony express or pigeon.

--
simon@jasmine.org.uk (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/

I shall continue to be an impossible person so long as those
who are now possible remain possible -- Michael Bakunin

[ Xposting restored ]

"Simon Brooke" <simon@jasmine.org.uk> wrote in message
news:ll5le3-v2t.ln1@gododdin.internal.jasmine.org.uk...
<snip>


Who the freck are you to tell *me* how I want to receive *my*
documents, *don't* tell me how I should use the web...

Next wrote:
The fundamental purpose of the World Wide Web is to transmit documents,
not programs, and HTML was a format designed for representing documents.
HTML does have a facility for embedding script that allows it to be
used for limited distribution of applications. There are better and/or
more powerful or flexible ways to do that--web services, Java applets,
or AJAX, for example. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with HTML.

Martin Underwood wrote:
HTML is simply not meant to be a page layout language. It's a document
markup language, and presentation is meant to be secondary. There's
normally no reason why a document needs to be displayed in a single
fixed format, and if you try, you make life difficult or impossible for
a large percentage of your audience.

Then provide PDFs and forget about HTML. If you want to use screws
instead of nails, then use a screwdriver rather than calling the hammer
deficient. Doesn't that make sense?

Harlan Messinger wrote in message
47qra1Fgli9cU1@individual.net:

Therein lies the problem: expecting web sites to be read on a very wide
variety of browers and devices, rather than saying that for a browser to be
a browser it has to conform to a very tightly-controlled standard. I know
HTML isn't meant to be a page layout language - my question is "why isn't
it?".

If I send a Word document, I don't expect people to be able, at a stroke, to
alter the sizes of all my fonts - apart from zooming in and out of the whole
page - thus destroying my carefully-crafted page layout. I wish browsers had
been designed with page layout given as much thought as content.

Jose wrote in message
P0JRf.621$4L1.18@newssvr11.news.prodigy.com:

I wasn't aware that I was being ridiculous. I was asking a question in all
innocence. From the replies, I see that I'm very much in the minority - well
what a surprise: what's new ;-)

I agree that a lot of the flashing animations that people think are "cool"
are a pain in the arse. I'm talking about simple text/page layout.

Yes. It pisses me off that for some sites, as I move the margins of my
window, the columns of tables grow/shrink and lines of text in a table or
paragraphs of text surrounding photographs change their wrapping.

Martin Underwood wrote:
Because that isn't what it was designed to be.

The original assumption was that styling/rendering would be handled by
the browser, and you'd pick/configure a browser to suit your own
preferred formatting styles.

Unfortunately, people who didn't understand this concept began abusing
the HTML to try to control rendering. And some of the browser authors
exacerbated that by adding styling features to their pre-standardization
dialects of HTML... and then, when HTML *was* standardized, the
standards committee was unwilling/unable to break those establieshed
(bad) practices.

The right answer is to write pure syntactic markup in HTML -- and then,
if you really care about how it renders, to provide a stylesheet that
implements those preferences. That leaves the reader room to reject the
stylesheet and use their browser's default rendering, or plug in a
different stylesheet. Part of the reason for the move to XHTML is to
allow XSLT (a more powerful stylesheet language than CSS) to render it
into XSL-FO (a more powerful page-layout language than annotated HTML).

That kind of style-crafting really isn't what HTML is designed for. You
can't defend an argument that it should have been; don't try. If you
want to publish something in absolutely-locked-in form, render it
yourself into something like PDF before publishing it -- but then don't
complain when your users scream that it doesn't work well on odd-sized
windows or paper.

If you want to redefine "browser" you are copying *exteremly* the wrong
newsgroups. Drop all the HTML discussions from the list. You may or may
not want to drop XML from the list too, unless the new language you're
inventing (and it *is* a new language, not HTML) will be based on XML.

Or consider just authoring XSL-FO directly.

--
Joe Kesselman / Beware the fury of a patient man. -- John Dryden

On Wed, 15 Mar 2006 16:48:10 -0000, "Martin Underwood" <a@b> wrote:

Your carefully-crafted page layout in Word can be destroyed quite
easily without any assistance from the recipient by:
a. different sized paper in the printer settings
b. different printer margins
c. non-available fonts
d. missing images and embedded objects

--
Regards, Paul Herber, Sandrila Ltd. http://www.pherber.com/
Electronics for Visio http://www.electronics.sandrila.co.uk/

Martin Underwood wrote:
Why should information be made less useful and less accessible? Why, for
example, should you want so badly to force people to sit at full screens
at their desks in order to get information, preventing them from
accessing it comfortably via their handhelds? Why should you waste your
time laying out an entire web site for a presumed screen resolution that
three years from now may be laughable, that may take up all of three
inches on a 17-inch monitor and be illegible? Why should I specially
have to turn zoom on to read your pages?

That's like asking why the Unicode standard for encoding the elements of
writing systems isn't meant to be a standard for spelling. It is what it
is and it isn't something else, and the reason it was developed as it
was is because there was a need for such a thing. If someone has
information to convey, most of the time there is no reason for the
person to be concerned with how that information *looks* to the person
reading it.

That's because word processing exists to prepare documents for printing
on paper. The Web does not exist for that purpose. Word processing is
the product of a time before the vast majority of people had computers,
had network access, had e-mail. *Now* you can send word processing
documents via the Internet or post them on a local network, but that's
incidental.

To illustrate further the really low importance of formatting in the
general scheme of things when information is transmitted through the
Internet, consider that even now that almost everyone *has* a word
processing application, most individuals send information through
*e-mail*. Usually plain-text e-mail. At most emphasis is shown, maybe by
surrounding a word or phrase in *asterisks*, and even then it's of no
concern to me how that looks on the other end (for example, most people
will see the asterisks; some clients might display the word boldface as
well--which is a user-configurable option!--but most won't). Page design
is the last thing on my mind when I send a note, a recipe, an invitation
to a friend.

Page layout has its (important) functions, but there's nothing
surprising about the existence of an elementary method of encapsulating
information without layout being a consideration.