Well, I'd say it is possible (it surely is, as some people actually do it !), but is indeed extremely hard.

Attaining the level of a master degree in any field seems possible to anyone with the required intelligence and power of will. The real gap might lie somewhere between master degree and PhD. At this level, the resources are pretty rare and sparse, and there is no easy entry point. It's quite understandable, as there are much fewer PhDs than BSc's, so few books are written for this audience. Also, I believe the field is not always cleared enough to be explained in one, standardized way like undergraduate or even graduate-level science: the didactic tools, standard exercises etc. might not always have been built - but that's only my impression, I might be wrong. And at this level, it's usually expected that you'll be guided in the field by some older, more experienced scientist, who knows what's most important and what you have to study first to understand some concept.

Actually, I'm not saying that you failed. I'm just saying that believing in science is no better than believing in anything else. For us mere mortals, it's not possible to "keep up with science" as we'll never understand the scientific background of these new discoveries, nor what they fully mean.

I /do/ believe in the scientific process, and I'm sure you guys are much more rigorous than mediaeval scientists were :) I'm just saying that for many people, geeks included, science is just a new religion. Keeping up with the "dogma" is a noble goal, but it doesn't make you really understand modern science.

Sorry to say that, but just reading sensationalist headlines, or even more "in-depth" explanations from knowledgeable scientists won't allow you to "keep up with science developments". Sure, you may learn (for example) that the Higgs boson has been found (or not), but you won't know:

- How.
- Nor which role it plays in the standard model, besides that "it allows to explain why some particles have a mass".

I fail to see what differentiates such knowledge from the belief our ancestors had that earth was flat, heavier body fell faster in vacuum than lighter ones, or that our body was filled with "humors", an unbalance of whom caused illnesses. Sure, we all think modern scientists are more trustable than the scientists of these times, but that does not change the fact that our belief in latest science developments are not more grounded than were the beliefs of the past.

Received. Many thanks !

gael.deest gmail

Many thanks to the kind person sending me one :)

OK. A sticky footer is a footer (...) that remains at the bottom of a page when there isn't enough content to fill the whole space, but that get pushed below when there is. In short, it's a footer that doesn't move to the middle of the page when it's almost empty.

This "solution" pulls the positioned box out of the flow, so content may be hidden. Oh yes, of course, we might add some padding to fix this, but what happens when we don't know the height of the box ? Tricky, isn't it ?

Your example doesn't work in Chrome. Rejected.

Huh... right. So, since I don't know HTML/CSS, please enlighten me ?

- How do I achieve the the sticky footer effect without an ugly hack and without using additional markup ?
- How do I place a box to the bottom of another variable height box ?
- How do I vertically center a fixed-height box within another fixed-height box ?

If you come up with an easy, no-hack solution that truly achieves separation of style and semantics - that is, that doesn't force you to change your markup to layout things the way you want -, I'm ready to admit I'm wrong.

Now, to reply point by point to your "conclusions" about my particular case:

(a) You might not believe it, but I have a job.
(b) I sure do, and that also happens to be my job. I'm just constantly limited in my creativity by the poor standards that are pushed on us.
(c) Well, I just gave you 3 examples of things that should be easy to do in a good standard.
(d) Frankly laughable.

Never said that it was, nor that table are a great tool for that. My point is: CSS wasn't born as a layout tool, but as a /styling/ tool. Hence the name.

My point (which you seem to miss entirely) was that CSS hasn't been designed as a layout tool. It was, of course, designed to separate semantics and presentation. But back then, presentation mostly meant: "which color should I use for this title ?" or "would this yellow text look better on a black or on a blue background ?". CSS was a great tool for such decisions. It simply wasn't adapted to the growing complexity of layouts, and still isn't.

I'm not saying that separating semantics and presentation is a bad goal. It isn't. I just feel that the emphasis should be put more on design features, and less on semantic-web-2.0-blah-blah.

Well, we obviously don't have the same definition of "mainstream". I still see quite a lot of IE7 and even IE6 requests in my logs.

And while most non-Microsoft browsers now have a decent support for CSS3, we musn't forget how much time it took for them to get it right. I didn't try iCab, so I can't say how great it CSS 2 was, but even the W3C hasn't been able to implement all of CSS2 into its own browser.

Ok, I know I'm gonna be modded as "Troll", but I need to say it: CSS is an horrible, backward, overly-complex standard. And yet, for philosophical / ideological reasons, it has been branded by the semantic folks as one of the most exciting innovation of the 20st century.

CSS has been invented in the days when most web pages consisted of simple blocks of text, with an occasional image floating left or right of it. All that was needed back then was changing the color of text, adding margins / paddings and that's about it. It was NOT designed to handle complex layouts: for that, you used tables.

And then the semantic folks arrived and told everyone using tables was baaaadddd for their main purpose was to present tabular data, not to layout things. And they were right, of course. But they made the wrong choice, deciding to extend CSS rather than crafting a new standard, specifically designed for the task. And here is the result: more than fifteen (15) years later, we still can't do simple things like "aligning this block to the bottom of this one" without using dirty - not semantic at all - hacks, or even falling back to JavaScript.

Even CSS 2 isn't supported properly by some browsers. Let alone CSS 3. And while you may think it isn't W3C's fault, I think perhaps, if some of the richest companies in the world haven't been able to implement this standard properly in, say, 10 years of continued effort, and that standard doesn't even reproduce all of the basic features that have been used in print for decades, it *might* be overly complex to get right. Look at these stupid cascading rules, for example: who seriously wants that ?

We need to move forward and develop new standards, focusing on /features/ rather than on pseudo-philosophical crap. We want to design websites that look great. Period.