Promoting a paragraph

[Thomas Dowling]

Because the CSS technique does not rely on the presumed appearance of any
given tag in unknown browsers (OmniWeb?  Amiga Mosaic?), does not generate
invalid
HTML, and degrades gracefully on browsers that do not support it.  Because I
don't want to go back and re-tag my pages when my boss downloads Microscape
5.0b1 and sees that it ignores everything except LI's in a UL.  And because
I'd rather spend my time learning how to describe a paragraph's desired
appearance in an appropriate language rather than learning all the
half-baked, halfway successful kludges in a language that will never, ever
provide the presentation capabilities I want: tell me the HTML hack that
will control
word and letter spacing or create the same size margin, indent, and line
length at 640x480 or 1600x1200 screen resolution.

Why would I recommend an alternate technique whose appearance in an unknown
browser is unpredictable?  Mis- or ab-use of UL, DL, and BLOCKQUOTE all fall
into this trap.  If a CSS solution creates the desired appearance in even
25% of all browsers and an acceptable appearance in 100%, and if another
technique creates the desired appearance in 75% of all browsers but
demonstrably breaks 1%, which should I use?

I apologize if I sound defensive or combative; I don't mean to.  My real
problem with the David Siegel-esque presentation hacks isn't really that
they don't always work (there are plenty of other reasons why you should be
off of Netscape 1.0, QMosaic, and MSIE 2 by now).  What really bothers me is
that they're so clumsy.  If a hanging indent is important enough that I have
to work for it, I don't intend to be satisfied with a hack that creates
"some" indent.  I want an indent of 4 em, or 25 pixels, or 1.25 cm, or 12%
of the window, and I want it to wrap correctly, and I want the vertical
whitespace to be correct.  Hell, I can get that in Wordpad without thinking
about it.  No amount of tweaking at UL, DL, BLOCKQUOTE, and TABLE even comes
close.

Thomas Dowling
Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: SHERYL DWINELL <dwinells at vmsb.csd.mu.edu>
To: Thomas Dowling <tdowling at ohiolink.edu>
Cc: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at library.berkeley.edu>
Date: Monday, October 06, 1997 8:54 PM
Subject: Re: Promoting a paragraph


> whitespace between the first and second lines.  This solution will work
for
> about one third of the browsers that hit the Berkeley Sunsite recently
> (http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/browsercount.pl).  I expect that many
> sites will see this figure rise to over half within the next couple of
> months.

Just out of curiosity, why would  you want to do something that will work
for only 1/3 and maybe in some determined amount of time 1/2 of your
potential viewers.  Style sheets are great, but if the majority of your
users have browsers that can't read them, what good are you doing them?
I'm not meaning to sound so negative, but I'm curious what you're
perspective is on this.

Sheryl Dwinell