Re: [dwm] [OT] Personal Website and CSS

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 10:31:47PM +0000, Anselm R Garbe wrote:
> 2009/2/18 Matthias-Christian Ott <ott_AT_mirix.org>:
> > since several years I have been planed to launch a personal website. I
> > used to do quite aesthetical web design before I have subscribed to
> > minimalism. What annoyed me then and now was CSS and its implementations
> > in modern browsers.
> >
> > When I tried to design a minimalist website (just some typographic
> > enhancements to make texts more read- and printable), I realised that
> > there seems to be no agreed standard for a default CSS stylesheet merely a
> > recommendation from the CSS standard [1] (which is incomplete) and a lot
> > of people seem to be concerned about resetting the browser CSS defaults -
> > even the W3C does so in their stylesheets [2]. Most people seems to have
> > installed nearly all popular browsers, test with those and incorporate
> > workarounds if necessary.
> >
> > All in all this seems very absurd to me and I would like to know how
> > you approached this problem.
> >
> > At the moment I'm just aware of The Anti-web Manifesto [3] that someone
> > linked to on this mailing list. Although I mainly subscribe to it,
> > browsers like Mozilla Firefox have terrible default typographic style
> > and using text-mode browsers like links often seems to be only solution
> > when reading longer texts.
> >
> > Any ideas?
>
> I think the only way is dropping HTML and CSS altogether and going
> with something new. I'd be very interested in contributing. I think
> the replacement should not only focus on presentation but equally on
> forming a base for less suckish applications which are highly network
> transparent.

Although not perfect, I like Display PostScript - at least it's approach
of having a text-based drawing language for network-transparent graphics.

One could take this idea and implement a register based virtual machine
that uses a stack to store their contents. You could then compile
arbitrary descriptions (like vector images or programmes) into assembly
language for the machine. Another advantage of this would be that you
can build hardware (e.g. programme FPGAs) that does all the computation.

I recently had to do some quick and dirty vector drawing and was quite
content with cairo.

I don't know how to incorporate events into this. But I suppose that
one could build an event layer on top of this.

To replace HTML which is tree-based I propose something scheme-like:

(doc (title TITLE) (text (ch CHAPTER (TXT))))

This is in my opinion a quite elegant linear representation.

However, I don't think that a tree-model is required for documents,
as for example Markdown or nroff demonstrate as counter-examples.

But in contrast to nroff I prefer the separation of content and formating.
 
> Kind regards,
> --Anselm

Regards,
Matthias-Christian
Received on Thu Feb 19 2009 - 13:34:05 UTC