From the archives, another design problem.

The CSS3 border module is well ahead of me, solving the problem of creating rich graphical borders. Sweet. I've suggested that another set of properties be added that are almost identical to those for specifying corner radii, but for beveling.

I've just been reading design books in Books Etc and looking at pavements and thinking about the discussion so far. My thoughts:

1. Grids are a great layout tool. Tables are a bad implementation of grids. There's no rotation or layering. Elements that should interact weakly (like borders) sometimes have to interact strongly with the content. A good idea might be to formalise layout grids into something other than <table>s, splitting them from data tables completely.
2. Positioning hierarchies are also very useful. Grids and indeed complex borders would be halfway implemented if we could nest layouts within blocks and define rigid rules for the sizing of those blocks. CSS2 states "[Positioning proerties] specify offsets with respect to the box's containing block." This is cool, but it also states "Absolutely positioned boxes are taken out of the normal flow. This means they have no impact on the layout of later siblings." Thus the result is not what you might predict. See this demo.
3. CSS is too dumb to suit authors. Authors can specify very quickly what they want to do in different situations, CSS does not allow them to write these specifications down. Example. If Hype is scaled so that it's only 200 pixels wide, I would want the columns to be stacked, but not in the order they are defined in the HTML. I'd want 1,3,2 instead of 1,2,3. This ties in with a lot of Coises' problems and constraints seem like a good way to express these nuances. However, I think that conditionals are really what's needed here and the constraints proposal doesn't really address that.

For a while I've been aware that there is a problem with including the XML prolog (<?xml version="1.0"?>) in XHTML documents, but nobody has explained what it was and I didn't bother to go looking. However, it puts IE 6 into "render like IE 5" mode which seems pretty dumb, however, it answers a few questions.

I will be removing the prolog from the pages on this site sometime soon.

After asking the WG to explain their thoughts on CCSS, Hixie said he didn't understand it and that a proposal in the form of a CSS 3 module with lots of examples would go a long way to solving that problem.

Why should I be writing out proposals on my budget of no money? The W3C has a large budget. I've identified some problems and I'm willing to both identify and catalog more. Call me naive but I thought it would be up to the W3C to go about the business of finding solutions. Oh well, that's another drain on my time.

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Last updated at 11:32, Wednesday June 18th, 2008. All times are shown in 24-hour clock format and are BST.

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