OT--Apples Pages outputs CSS

[Sivakatirswami]

Aloha Tom:

Pages output off CSS is very bad example -- implementation of CSS    
MS programs can be worse.... the *only* decent implementation of html  
export for layout programs (and I've seen out put from most all of  
them over the past 10 years) is Gluon's Web Express for Quark for  
anyone still using Quark and who is rigorously consistent in the use  
of style sheets inside Quark itself. Web Express was/is a dream  
tool...  Even Adobe still doesn't know how to do it right, for all  
the hype over CS2.  (we are begging Adobe to fix this and we think  
they are listening...)

Why? the key to successful use of CSS is not to use any, or as little  
as possible, inline style declarations. At most, you "may" use a  
minute bit in the head of the document where you need to override the  
external CSS for a particular document, But the power of CSS is to  
produce purely structural xhtml docs with zero presentation info (and  
that includes inline CSS declarations--there is really very little  
difference between <p style="font-size:12px;"> and <p><font  
size="4">)  i.e. your web docs look like elegant XML and then you  
literally "drive the design" from the CSS style sheet.

If you are really serious about CSS, and are just getting started, go  
to the top, meet my two best friends:

1) Dan Schafer's book "HTML Utopia"
2) www.westciv.com

Don't hesitate. buy his book, and buy WestCiv's tutorials.

Also, look at the code here:

www.csszengarden.com

to see how it should be done, from the start...

Sivakatirswami

PS. That said: Pages output is  consistent...and if you like to  
design in that environment, then use BBEdit and run Tidy on the  
exported docs and tell TIDY to write the external CSS file for you  
and clean up the doc to pure XHTML structural mark up and it will do  
a good job.

On Aug 29, 2005, at 2:41 AM, Thomas McCarthy wrote:

>
> Completely off-topic but...
> I've been investigating cascading style sheets and noticed that on  
> the surface, a lot of css sites resembled Pages templates. I  
> exported a Pages file to html and looked at it. Sure enough it used  
> css.
>
> It might be a good way to start using css. I haven't checked  
> KeyNote, yet.
> FWIW
> tom
>
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