Morbus Iff wrote:
You simplify it greatly. The intent of CSS is to separate the presentation of a document with its structure. No longer, for ...
This is (relatively, for a quick example) strong document structure: each div has a meaning, and has been given a CSS class that represents its presentation. From the DOM standpoint, it is easy for us to, say, style just chapter, just the first chapter, just the section of chapter one, or what have you. With XSLT or an XML capable browser, we can query the model to "give us all chapters" or "give us all contents". From a jQuery standpoint, we can do the same thing. This is a strong DOM.
Rounded corners, when implemented as CSS, traditionally pollute this DOM, in much the same way that all the empty ... some presentation to them. They are presentation logic, mucking up my document structure. Much like the empty Pedantry aside, this remains a religious argument. Terms like "pollute" and "mucking" are subjective, emotional terms that do not directly represent anything of objective value. Taking your example, it is still possible to query the DOM to find all chapters or contents. And *that* is why I -1 to rounded edges, unless they are applied via jQuery, which does NOT mess with the DOM in a way that negatively affects my document (the modifications are applied by the client software, at user request, NOT hardcoded into the document itself). And here's the flaw: It's not your document; it's a transient, internal representation.
The separation of presentation from content makes perfect sense when the HTML is the data. And that's the way things were in the early days, or with tools like FrontPage. But that's not the case for Drupal, where the data model is the SQL, and the presentation layer is the theme. The HTML generated by the theme is then presentation, along with the CSS. Issues such as whether the login block goes into the same sidebar as the calendar or the recent posts are captured by the HTML. Yes, clever enough CSS can rearrange divs from their natural order in the HTML, but that just illustrates the absurdity of taking a hard line. Decisions around which text can be displayed in alternative fonts are captured by <span> and related tags; these frequently have underlying semantics, but not necessarily. Or you get into arguments over whether a decision to visually emphasize a word is a semantic or presentational issue. Rather than going down this rathole, it just makes more sense to deal in real value. Does using clever HTML/CSS for rounded corners make it harder to maintain the theme? more so than other CSS cleverness? Does it create problems for the person looking at it? Is it harder to do client-side JavaScript because of is? In other words, focus on the impact on people, and not the impact on theoretical models. Gary