CSS & MHonArc markup experiment

[Jeff Breidenbach <jeff@xxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

Out of curiosity, I took a uncustomized MHonArc generated message page
and replaced all the MHonArc markup with HTML <div> tags.  For
example, turning <!--X-Body-of-Message--> into <div
id=X-Body-of-Message>

It was a fairly clean process. There were a couple of small
inconsistances here and there, but nothing that couldn't be ironed out
by hand in a couple of minutes. At the end of the day, I had all of
the sections of the message page demarkated clearly.

The next step was to adapt a stylesheet from the (amazing)
csszengarden website, and key it off those div tags. It worked quite
well and I was able to produce some very aesthetic message pages
purely from manipulating CSS. I'm not posting a link because the
graphic designers at csszengarden don't really like their artwork
being republished. But the result was graphically appealing, and
the stylesheet allows for some cosmetic flexibility without going
through the rigors of HTML page regeneration.

So... I am looking for comments before I dive further with this
approach. Does the idea seem generally sound? Is this the general
trend and might MHonArc someday in the distant future abandon the HTML
comment based semantic markup of message pages, switching to something
style sheets can also key off off? Are people already doing exactly
this thing on their archives?  Am I doing something particularly
stupid or naive with respect to this experiment?

Cheers,
Jeff










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Inconsistancies: lack of <!--X-Body-End-->, some markup not using
the <--*-Begin--> convention, etc. Almost certainly this are just
small legacy foibles.