Slashdot Mirror
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?"
What's next?
XHTML2 and CSS3
But XHTML2 can't be a reality until IE can parse XHTML, or IE loses a lot more market share. (no, it can't, it can parse pretend XHTML that's served as text/html, and you can't serve XHTML 1.1 or XHTML2 as text)
. CSS Zen Garden [csszengarden.com] should stand as solid proof that CSS works
No, it doesn't. Seeing as web programming is my job, I can tell yout that tables - horrible as they may be - make a better layout tool than CSS. I can't tell you how many times I have to tell graphic designers that one of the elements of their design (like equal length columns) is a major pain in the neck to implement in CSS. Of course, IE's horribly buggy CSS2 support doesn't help, but there are so many things in CSS that seem - well - stupid. CSS was designed around an idealistic view of the web - a web where pages were designed by web developers. In the real world, this is rarely the case - it is the graphic designers who lay out the page, and the web programmers get stuck trying to implement their design. CSS utterly fails in that regard.
Sure, you can make a design that works well using CSS - zen garden and countless other sites prove this. But there are so many things that were simple with tables that become unnecessarily complex with CSS.
Most developers simply give up and resort to absolute positioning or nesting tags. Neither is substantially better than the tables that they replaced - and in many cases, they are substantially worse.
There are other elements of CSS that are utterly stupid. Why should padding be excluded from "width"? Or, for that matter, the border? Why is it so hard to make equal-height columns?
Is CSS better than what it replaced? In terms of element style - borders, fonts, colors, etc. - it's substantially better. But CSS sucks at layout.