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the arcane kludges needed to produce popular web-page layout effects easily achieved using evil tables

Rejoice brother, for the era of display:table-cell has begun (supported in IE8 and up, and IE7 is effectively dead, thank god). Nice clean semantic markup, but now with access to all the juicy table features like vertical & horizontal-block centering, shared column height, and automatic column sizing. (Good article: http://www.digital-web.com/articles/everything_you_know_about_CSS_Is_wrong/)

You know there's something wrong with a standard when Microsoft's broken box-model implementation makes more sense.

We now have the option to use this as well :) http://paulirish.com/2012/box-sizing-border-box-ftw/ Again, supported in IE8 and up.

Especially on responsive/fluid sites (where you often want to do things like, "I want this column to be 33.333% wide, oh but I also want 10px of inner padding"), this is a revelation. Sure we could've used a wrapper div, but sometimes this is not an option, and either way it makes the markup cleaner.

Other IE8+ stuff we can now use includes:
- :first-child (but hilariously, NOT :last-child)
- multiple class selectors (.foo.bar)
- direct-descendant selectors (.foo > .bar)
- :before and :after (IE8 still has some minor bugs, but easily avoidable)

Here's the BAD news:

IE10 has removed support for conditional comments, and .htc (something like PIE polyfill is now impossible). Go ahead and try getting something like border-image (or even a reasonable fallback) working in IE10, I dare you.

the lack of 'constants' to set standard colours and measurements

You're of course correct that native CSS still has no concept of anything like that. This is where LESS or SASS come in. And with the power of mixins (ie, to easily generate all the browser prefixes for more advanced stuff like gradients, shadows, etc), it's getting borderline irresponsible to not use a pre-processor. I instantly switched to SASS when I discovered this: http://jakearchibald.github.io/sass-ie/. This technique, I am convinced, is THE way to write maintainable, sophisticated responsive code (with a good path to easily strip out all media queries for IE8) right now.

The domain is currently moving

We expect to run again at the domain. Sunday 22nd March 2009.

The gist of the linked article is that a "grid" layout model can be better in some cases, such as when you want to have a colored background in a navigation sidebar that's as tall as the element next to it that contains the main text. CSS fanboys decry using table elements for layout, but the basic "flow" layout model of CSS has trouble representing grids, or even representing "this element should be as tall as this other element". CSS has properties designed for grid layout (display: table, display: table-row, and display: table-cell), but they're useless on sites with a wide audience because IE 5, 6, and 7 ignore them.

ObTopic: It appears that Windows Internet Explorer 8 finally supports CSS grids, and IE 8 comes with Windows 7. But you'll still have a lot of customers on Windows versions prior to 7 and IE versions prior to 8, and if you build your site around CSS grids, your site won't look professional enough for your customers using IE 6 and 7 to continue seeking information on your products or services.

First your skills ARE incredibly valuable and you deserve your high pay for the hard intellectual work you do. However tight architecture is NOT the only thing that makes a web site successful in fact good graphic design is what the user sees up front, you can have the best most efficient modularized back end and if you have such poor taste that you put say blue text on a yellow background your web site will still be an usability disaster. In short there IS a place for people with art/design background who know about things like white space:

http://www.digital-web.com/articles/css_101/

The most readable fonts, what an anti aliased font is, what colors complement each other, having enough color contrast for web page elements to stand out etc. If you implement a web side with the best most efficient custom coded Drupal plugins but fail to find a designer no one will want to visit your unshiny fast beast. In short don't just snidely dismiss those of us whose skill set runs towards photoshop, Wacom tablets, Dreamweaver, basic Joomla and reading poetry on lunch breaks if you want a popular web site as well as one that is efficient. Your code oriented arrogance may well be your own downfall if you can't see beyond the forest of fastest sorting algorithms and other non visual CS oriented thinking.

I've been looking into very same thing and found this article.

Hope that helps.

Writing Semantic Markup: Transition to XML
from: Web 2.0 for Designers which is linked by the referenced blog,br> One of the biggest steps in realizing Web 2.0 is the transition to semantic markup, or markup that accurately describes the content its applied to. The most popular markup languages, HTML and XHTML, are used primarily for display purposes, with tags to which designers can apply styles via CSS.

Fitting more on-screen, particularly on wide-screen monitors, is a useful idea, but a separate issue covered in other articles.

Here is another review from Digital Web Magazine

Here is another review from Digital Web Magazine

ok, guess I just learned to make sure I have *text* selected...

here it is as I actually typed it:

Jeremy Wright just posted a comment over at

http://www.digital-web.com/news/2005/06/microsoft_ to_take_rss_five_steps_backwards/#comment1361

and pointed out the fact that the stuff MS is doing it actually fairly syndication agnostic. (Read: 'not just rss') They HAD to extend RSS to get the functionality they wanted that already exists the ATOM spec.

So if you are worried that they will some how *screw you* if you try to use their extensions, just use ATOM and the functionality is already there.

BTW I think the fact that their extension is being released under the same CC license as the RSS2.0 spec should earn them a little credit, but then again this is /. so I don't expect the 'regulars' to even notice.

Here is the CC info that bother the original RSS2.0 spec and the MS extensions have been released under:
"Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License" http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/

Jorgie

Jeremy Wright just posted a comment over at http://www.digital-web.com/news/2005/06/microsoft_ to_take_rss_five_steps_backwards/#comment1361 and pointed out the fact that the stuff MS is doing it actually fairly syndication agnostic. (Read: 'not just rss') They HAD to extend RSS to get the functionality they wanted that already exists the ATOM spec. So if you are worried that they will some how *screw you* if you try to use their extensions, just use ATOM and the functionality is already there. BTW I think the fact that their extension is being released under the same CC license as the RSS2.0 spec should earn them a little credit, but then again this is /. so I don't expect the 'regulars' to even notice. Here is the CC info that bother the original RSS2.0 spec and the MS extensions have been released under: "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License" http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/ Jorgie

> You can detect opera on the server just fine

Oh? Perhaps you can tell me what happens when you set an entry in ua.ini to 4 or 5?
http://www.scss.com.au/family/andrew/opera/browser ids

> And no, you don't need to test for browser or version ever, for any reason, period.

So I guess I shouldn't care that earlier versions of Opera don't support certain CSS parsing behavior
http://centricle.com/ref/css/filters/?whitebg

And I shouldn't care what improvements happen between versions of the same browser in case someone is using an older one
http://www.quirksmode.org/css/selector_attribute.h tml

And I shouldn't care when Firefox implements CSS3 and eventually deprecates/drops the -moz equivalents like -moz-box-sizing
http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/css/properties/e xtensions/nsextensions.htm

Just because you don't think knowing the browser version is important doesn't mean that everyone thinks the way you do. Plenty of people care enough about it enough that there are plenty of client side version detectors out there
http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/sniffer/ browser_type.html

Perhaps, before calling us all idiots, you may want to offer an alternate solution that works.

> test "does this feature I want to use work"

It would be nice if I could do this, but the unfortunate reality is that CSS does not work this way.

Unfortunately, CSS capabilities are not testable from script in any browser. You can only rely on the browser version to determine what is or is not available. Getting it wrong might result in a minor cosmetic problem or a browser crash, or maybe a hang. It is cleaner instead to base CSS on the browser version.

This is a problem, yes. And it was made worse by not being able to rely on the user agent string.

CSS hacks were the result. eg.
http://www.albin.net/CSS/OwenHack.html

But CSS hacks are an ugly workaround and don't solve all your problems.
http://digital-web.com/articles/keep_css_simple/

The CSS hack approach seriously lacks elegance.
I believe that version detection is far more elegant by comparison
(providing you get the detailed version info - IE needs to report the service pack level).

Unfortunately, since the cat is already out of the bag (all the existing opera browser instances), relying on the user agent string will never truly be an airtight solution.

Perhaps instead, it would be easier and better to restore elegance to CSS. We just need to convince all the browser manufacturers to make the browser version truly testable in the CSS @media descriptor. Or maybe propose an @version descriptor.

The capacity of short term memory is important here: a person at random can remember or concentrate on 7 +/- 2 items at once.

Actually, these days the IA and usability folks are telling us (web designers, at least) to take Miller's rule of seven with a grain of salt.

Isn't that sort of reaction kinda par for the "Mac user tries anything else" course?

You're a troll, but I'll bite. The author of the article is not just some Mac user, he's Joe Gillespie, an established pro in graphic design and typography. By "established", I mean for the past 20 years or so he's been doing this kind of thing. Link 1, link 2. Nothing a little trip to google won't clear up if you're looking for credentials.

First of all it's mentioned in the chapter "99.9% of websites are obsolete (which was previously an essay) that in the future sites will either be built with flash or web standars. using flash for site design (not just small elements, or segments) is typically a bad idea because: 1. flash is not viewable by spiders/robots that popular search engines use. therefore your content isn't ranked highly. 2. flash content is not viewable on most mobile platforms (cell phones/pdas/ etc.) 3. flash content is largly unavaiable to the disabled public (people that use screen readers etc)

A good anti-JavaScript Libraries article:
Keep JavaScript Simple By Peter-Paul Koch

kio_fish is a very handy and nice feature for all KDE apps, I totally agree.

What I was saying in the article though is that there is no built in interface (that I'm aware of) which allows you to browse remote servers from *within* the HTML app itself. Quanta Gold provides that functionality, albeit only through FTP, by including an 'FTP' pane within the application. (This image and this pic (195Kb) for examples of what I mean.

I also realize that one could set up NFS or Samba mounts on the local FS, to achieve remote connections through the application, but that's not something the Application provides *itself*. So while kio_fish is something I really like and use quite often, it would slow development down a lot to have to open up each file individually via File -> Open -> Location -> fish://...

It's a lot faster to be able to view the remote directories in realtime and being able to select which files you wish to open with something as simple as a double-click.

Appreciate the feedback,

Dan

Hot on the heals of last weeks Are 99.9% of Websites Obsolete? comes a follow up at Digial Web: 99.9% of Proper Grammar Is Obsolete.

"An equal opportunity disease afflicts nearly every person now on the Web, from the humblest instant messenger to the multi-million-dollar-salaried heads of corporate giants. Cunning and insidious, the disease goes largely unrecognized because it is based on centuries of convention and grammar-school education. Though these users don't know it yet, 99% of the grammar they type is obsolete."

Read the rest.

Although interesting, I have doubts this will ever catch on because of it being so different from the current way mail is sent. Maybe the changes would not be openly visible, but I don't like the idea that my computer may have to use extra cycles just to send a letter. If this would end spam then I would consider this a worth while, but it most likely would not; at least not for a long time.

Because the currect mail systems do not have this system in place, it may be doomed to failure because of the aspect of backward compatibility. This article posted today on slashdot says that 99.9% of all websites are obsolete because of backward compatibility. As a developer, I too am guilty of programming for browsers as low as IE4 and Netscape 4. This problem alone could cause it to take several years to catch on, if ever.

Karma whore? Sure. I guess. But I'm already at 50, so what do I care? I'm just saving you from doing a Google search on "Powazek".

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