Structure vs. presentation?
JWZ writes that he’s confused by the promotion of CSS by the W3C et al.; I don’t believe that he quite understands the issue — or if he does, he professes to be ignorant in order to win some rhetorical point.
He seems to be annoyed that so many folks hated the presentation-oriented markup which Netscape introduced. He ignores the fact that structural markup leads to Good Things: automated indexing; improved searching; automatic transformation of presentation while leaving content unchanged, reading by the disabled (whether physically or technologically, e.g. those with old computers) &c.
He is correct that presentational markup is also important. People want to be able to design attractive pages, and to do that they’d like some control over the way the page will look. CSS is a nice (albeit imperfect) attempt to create a flexible presentation-oriented language. As long as the designer is smart, pages will be attractive at various resolutions, window sizes &c., but he will have a lot of power at his fingertips, using a tool meant for the job (CSS) rather than a mess of hacks (HTML-based presentation). And if he really wishes to ignore certain populations, he’s free to do so.
The situation with CSS is in many ways much better than with presentation-oriented HTML, and in none worse.