[whatwg] <nostyle> consideration

[Thomas Powell]

On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 4:23 PM, Kornel Lesinski <kornel at geekhood.net>wrote:

> On Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:26:21 +0100, Thomas Powell <tpowell at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>  1) Head Usage
>>
>> <nostyle>
>>  <meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0;url=/errors/stylerequired.html">
>> </nostyle>
>>
>>
>> 2) Body Usage
>>
>> <nostyle>
>>  <h2>Warning: Styles required for correct rendering</h2>
>> </nostyle>
>>
>
> Purpose of this element seems to make lack of CSS "not my problem" instead
> of providing meaningful alternative.
>
> This is not helpful for users without CSS. It only helps authors to
> discriminate against them, and I'm strongly against it.
>

There is no intention of that in the proposal, you seem to have eliminated
the discussion about dynamic content which is also discrimentory of such
users as well as well as the error reporting examples.  I showed a variety
of negative and positive cases.

My interest here in this tag in fact has grown out of a problem with lack of
understanding of users with various
capabilities rather than some particular design or tech agenda.


>
>  Comments?
>>
>
> <noscript> is a very poor solution, and <nostyle> would be too. You should
> use graceful degradation/progressive enhancement instead (in both cases).
>

Couldn't agree more about the architecture, if you read any of my books
particularly my Ajax one I am strong proponent of falling back not locking
out, but obviously that choice is philosophical not technical. A negative
lock out approach can be accomplished whether or not this element exists
though as you say it makes it easier for some to treat a class of users bad.
 While I am not sure that markup elements can really force a philosophy of
Web design/dev though they can certainly encourage it and so I understand
the passion of not wanting to enable "tech abusers" any more than we have
to, so point taken, but it actually doesn't fit with my experience.

Consider your opinion of the value of <noscript> for me I have to disagree
it has been quite valuable.  In fact my main use is simply to show people
about the reality of people turning things off or not supporting script
rather than letting them cite arbitrary hear say about the issue. We have
customers that have used it just to quantify exactly what you are worried
about - down level user-agents or script off folks.  It has really helped me
get people on board with seeing the realities of addressing such contingency
cases.  Log files could certainly do this too but in the age of script based
Google analytics unlikely for most.

Given the blissful ignorance about measuring script use it would be great to
see a  <noscript> tag (or maybe even this dreaded <nostyle>) being employed
for good because in many cases the discrimentory use of Web tech changes
once people see the traffic they fail to serve properly to in a measurable
manner rather than an abstract statement about what they ought to do (at
least rational corporate types act that way if experience is a judge).
 Anyway I am sure you can think of a bunch of bad uses of JS, but that if
anything only proves the point of the need, if a site owner is going to be
restrictive for better or worse it would be better to be aware of your
choice in a quantifiable way and error to your users properly?

In short I simply view this nostyle element simply as a symmetrical element
to other aspects of Web tech: on state/off state that's it. It can be used
for good or ill like most anything and it actually supports a view of
awareness of all rendering cases by its mere availability. Judging by
comments it would appear that some view the "style off" state of being
handled just fine with plain markup.

-Thomas

-- 
> regards, Kornel Lesinski
>
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