kenfine wrote:Thanks for the replies, everyone.
Part of what I'm exploring is how "web standards" translate to real world implementations. Ideally every client would adhere to W3C. If that's not happening, then developers have two choices:
a) develop to a spec that they believe the world "should" follow; or
b) develop something that works for the clients that are out there.
Shining, I think you missed some of the nuance of what I'm saying. No need to cite csszengarden; look again and you'll notice that site linked in my original message. Nor am I asking if CSS layout is worthwhile or not; one scenario I mentioned was rendering CSS1/2 out of dynamic database content.
It's reasonable to ask whether the gains one gets out of a theoretically purer and more elegant implementation are worth the costs in time and compatability. "Proper" "usable" and "HTML soup" are loaded terms with inbuilt biases.
Guiding the discussion a bit: given the following clients:
BlackBerry
PocketPC
Safari
Windows Smartphone
Other Phone types
Accessible screenreaders
...how do they render "web standards"? (anyone know? Bueller?) Do they do better with plain text, tableless HTML, or CSS? If they don't directly support CSS, what are typical strategies for tranforming data from CSS'ed markup to a form that works well for them? This isn't a set-up job... I'm honestly interested in how other people get the work done, and how those methods compare to server-side methods that I understand well.
What are the limits of translations from CSS to other presentational forms, and how do people get around these limits? It's clear to me how to make differently styled pages, or printer-ready versions of pages, or pages that are optimized for a particular display format. It's less obvious how you can use CSS to do things that typically involve server-side code: a rendering as PDF, or a rendering as a multipart mail, or a translation to an XML feed.
-KF
This is what media types are for. You can have a different stylesheet for those devices. If I recall there are some nice articles on this at alistapart:
http://www.alistapart.com/
