A New Era in CSS Centric Design?

byrnereese wonders: "The media never fails to point out how the age of Web Two-Point-Oh has helped to drive the adoption of Ajax into the Internet industry, but rarely does anyone point out that it has also help popularize CSS-centric design practices -- the Slashdot redesign being only one example. But now that we, as programmers, feel comfortable ditching the use of font tags, finally grok div's, understand absolute vs relative positioning, and can work around all of IE's CSS bugs, what is the next step for HTML and CSS? Several standards or conventions seem to be coming to forefront: one is building standards around the HTML structure itself so that wildly different designs can be achieved via style-sheets alone (e.g. CSS Zen Garden and The Style Contest), the other being the standardization of CSS classes (e.g. micro-formats) so that semantic meaning can be derived from the class name we use to label our content. Both show an interesting potential for how this technology is evolving. So here is the question for all the visionaries out there: where is this taking us? What's next for HTML? What's next for CSS?"

Comments

Absolute positioning makes things much worse

[Animats]

I'm totally fed up with absolute positioning. That was a terrible idea. It was a bad idea in TeX, it was a bad idea in PostScript, and it is a bad idea in CSS. Now font width assumptions are built into the layout. We have text that runs off the page boundaries, buttons that move when clicked, and browser-specific dreck in the page markup. Giant step backwards. Tables were a good feature and they need to come back.