Comments on: The broken web

By: James

James — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:58:07 +0000

But hey! CSS 3 will support layout via ASCII art!

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-layout/#rowheight

By: Jason

Jason — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 01:35:12 +0000

Gabe da Silveira, I tried your CSS, and it doesn’t match the table version presented. Using the same HTML you presented, how do you make each of the three columns the same size?

By: Steven Wittens

Steven Wittens — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:34:24 +0000

It’s ridiculous to complain about CSS in 2010 without looking at the history behind it. The CSS specification has in fact moved on, and so have all the browsers, except for one: Internet Explorer.

CSS2, which became a W3C recommendation in 1998, gives you perfect equivalents of all the old-school HTML table layout modes, without all the crufty markup. All the alternative browsers have supported this for years. Microsoft waited until IE8. That means nobody can use it without hacks until IE7 has died, which will be several more years.

Floats and clears were never meant to do multi-column page layout; they were, surprisingly, intended for floating elements.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-CSS2-20080411/

Point the finger at the party to blame, not at the web developers who have made lemonade out of the lemons they were given.

By: Gabe da Silveira

Gabe da Silveira — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:23:46 +0000

Okay here we go, the proper HTML from above:

Column 1

Column 2

Column 3

By: Gabe da Silveira

Gabe da Silveira — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:22:50 +0000

Trying again:

>div class=”column”/div<
>div class=”column”/div<
>div class=”column”/div<

By: Gabe da Silveira

Gabe da Silveira — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:21:15 +0000

What a ridiculous strawman you’ve set up.

A comparable CSS layout to what you’ve specified in HTML is:

Column 1
Column 2
Column 3

.column { width: 33%; float: left }

CSS may seem pretty crude if you are a graphic designer who just wants to make something look pixel perfect. However such a person would recognize that even something as simple as getting the right color on a printed design requires deep knowledge of CMYK, paper stocks, and printing techniques.

HTML/CSS are certainly not convenient for pixel precision. However they do manage to be the first true multi-platform multi-media open content format that can be accessed by tens of thousands of different devices, can be used by both the deaf and the blind and all other populations.

That is no small achievement, and though many have proclaimed how much better they can do, no one has created an alternative that gained any traction whatsoever. So, if you want to do web design, maybe you should actually learn how it works, rather than writing banal rants demonstrating your own ignorance and utter disregard for the people who actually created the future you are now enjoying?

By: iPad Links: Monday, March 1, 2010 « Mike Cane's iPad Test

iPad Links: Monday, March 1, 2010 « Mike Cane's iPad Test — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:56:20 +0000

[...] Design: The broken web Input contexts: switching from mouse to keyboard The Future Of CSS Typography Still ignores [...]

By: Charlie Hubbard

Charlie Hubbard — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:33:43 +0000

Yes it IS still broken. We have really pathetic tools today when we compare the precision desktop development tools provided in terms of layout nearly two decades ago before the web. I think the problem has been the humongous overhead of being backwardly compatible, and the stagnant w3c group. HTML 5 is not helpful IMO for what’s the real problem. How do we change what we have without affecting the internet/ I wrote a blog post about a potential solution that would keep us backwardly compatible, but allow us to move forward without having to start over.

http://wrongnotes.blogspot.com/2009/09/what-if-html-wasnt-top-dog.html

By: This is MADNESS

This is MADNESS — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:29:37 +0000

THIS IS SEPARATING-CONTENT-FROM-PRESENTATIONLAND!

By: Twitted by webstartupgroup

Twitted by webstartupgroup — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:24:29 +0000

[...] This post was Twitted by webstartupgroup [...]