From: Thomas Hurst <tom.hurst@...>
Date: 2002-03-20T08:49:14+09:00
Subject: Re: web templating for static sites?

* Albert L. Wagner (alwagner@uark.edu) wrote:

> How do you Ruby/HTML guys deal with the different versions of HTML and
> browsers?

Semantic XHTML 1.1, biodegradable CSS 2, to hell with people who expect
me to directly support broken half-decade old browsers.  They get
various degrees of the HTML 2.0 look (which, don't get me wrong, I
ensure is entirely usable).

NS 4 supports font/colour stuff reasonably (sort of), and the things it
breaks can be hidden behind @import statements.  If you want absolute
control, use PDF or Flash, and accept that you're leaving the realm of
the web for some mystery binary realm that happens to use HTTP as a
transport :)

> I would be interested in something that would take, e.g., a page of
> HTML4.01 with Style sheets and do a reasonable job of porting it
> backward to earlier standards and older browsers.

Why bother?  You're not going to convert the CSS box model to tables
automagically, so aside from throwing in a few font tags you're not
going to gain much (especially when pretty much every browser on earth
already understands such basic CSS and those that don't are used by a
total of about 0.001% of the web).

The best you're likely to do is run an XML parser or an XSL over the
XHTML and reformat it to XHTML 1.0 Transitional using a manual target
template rather than banging your head against the wall trying to
generalise a HTML+CSS -> HTML Transitional converter.

-- 
Thomas 'Freaky' Hurst  -  freaky@aagh.net  -  http://www.aagh.net/
-
In the force if Yoda's so strong, construct a sentence with words in
the proper order then why can't he?