Separating Behavior from Presentation?
August 4, 2004 – 8:47 pmJeremy’s written up an interesting thought over at Adactio: is the :hover pseudo-class in CSS an inappropriate mixing of behavior and presentation? Basically, the idea is that CSS is the proper place to store presentation info about a document, (X)HTML is the proper place to store the content, and DOM Scripting (via, e.g., JavaScript) is the proper place to store the behavior. According to Jeremy’s argument, the :hover pseudo-class is just as vile an abomination as, say, the <b> tag, since it’s a CSS item talking about behavior.
At first blush, I want to say he’s wrong - that the :hover pseudo-class is fine as a part of CSS. I don’t, however, have an argument worked out for this yet, so I’ll leave it there and post more later. Hey, you smarter-than-me people - what do you think?
