Dvorak Rants on CSS 522
John Dvorak writes on CSS after working on redesigning his weblog, the article ended up being extremely funny. From the write-up:
As we move into the age of Vista, multimedia's domination on the desktop, and Web sites controlled by cascading style sheets running under improved browsers, when will someone wake up and figure out that none of this stuff works at all?!
Two problems (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Two problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Two problems (Score:5, Funny)
Don't worry, IE7 will solve all of your problems.
[insert failed attempt to keep a straight face here]
Re:Two problems (Score:3, Interesting)
Yup...now in IE7...none of it will work. Not even the clever work arounds of the past to get older versions to work....
Sorry..I couldn't keep a straight face either...
Re:Two problems (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Two problems (Score:5, Funny)
Not running an ACID2 compliant web browser, I see
Re:Two problems (Score:5, Informative)
Well, actually it does. Except I'm talking about this IE7: http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/ [edwards.name]
I installed that, and suddenly I was able to write standard css, and not go crazy trying to make IE work.
It's actually quite wonderful. I don't know why Microsoft can't aford to fix it's own bugs, and needs other people to do it for them, but hey, at least it works.
Re:Two problems (Score:3, Funny)
Good thinking, you're almost there. The 'not ready for production websites' is spot on, now change 'It' into 'IE' and you've understoond the problem.
Re:Two problems (Score:5, Interesting)
On top of crazy interpretations that different browsers display, I had the damnedest time trying to get the w3c recommended "DIV" tags to float in the right places. I ended up going back to tables, which really screws up text based browsers and screen readers. Why the hell can't anyone stick to a standard?
The problem leads to bad design habits (i.e. designing for only popular browsers), complex pages (i.e. javascript browser detectors that load different pages for different browsers), and n00b frustration that encourages use of monstrosities like Frontpage and Yahoo page builder.
Blame Internet Explorer (Score:5, Informative)
If you want to complain, complain about Internet Explorer. Mozilla, Opera and (as far as I know) Safari all support the CSS table rendering model [w3.org], which can do almost everything that HTML tables can. The main thing it lacks is support for colspan and rowspan, but for your average website layout (banner across the top and one or maybe two sidebars beside the content) you can get away without using either.
Of course, Internet Explorer only supports the bare minimum of the stuff in that chapter, and even then only when applied to HTML tables. Nor does Microsoft plan to support it in the near future. Most people don't even know that CSS can do table rendering because of Microsoft's lack of support, but the truth is that for all of CSS's warts, simple table-based layouts are actually right there in the CSS2 spec and will work just fine in every modern browser except Microsoft's.
Re:Blame Internet Explorer (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Blame Internet Explorer (Score:5, Insightful)
(Disclaimer: I may have forgotten the actual most common cause of death.)
Re:Blame Internet Explorer (Score:4, Interesting)
I vote on your behalf was casted for Billy G. (Purchasing a computer with Windows preinstalled)
You can of course cast a second vote for Linus, (install Linux) or vote again for Billy G (upgrade Windows).
Nevertheless, your original vote for Billy G cannot be revoked.
P.S. If you can't prove that you paid your original poll tax we'll recend your voters registration card (WGA) but still count the vote because it suits us.
RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!
MSIE = Embrace and Extend (Score:3, Interesting)
The sad part is that many people will probably read your comment and miss the sarcasm completely.
I have had many otherwise knowledgable people who make their living from designing websites defend the practice of designing for IE an
Re:Blame Internet Explorer (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Two problems (Score:3, Insightful)
Web designers have been asking Microsoft this question for 10 years.
(And now they're asking why Firefox 2.0 can't pass the ACID2 test, either)
Funny how monopolies don't care much about competing on merits like that. You, the consumer, get screwed as a result. 10 years on, and it still needs to be explained?
Re:Two problems (Score:5, Interesting)
How about this: All browsers must support CSS1 completely and CSS 2.1's positioning at least. floats and centering with margin: auto should frickin' work. Then we need something like SVG and png w/ transparency. That would at least allow us to do flash like things and use a decent graphics format. Flash is bad since it doesn't support all platforms. Most people say its great because it work on x86 linux, windows and the latest OSX. What about everyone else? (*bsd, solaris, linux on any other kind of processor, OS/2, etc)
We also need a decent video format that is cross platform for streaming. I don't care what it is just so that everyone actually has it. I'm sick of not getting to watch news feeds because i don't use MSIE with WMP 10 or 11 series. (yes MSNBC you suck) I can't even watch it in firefox on WINDOWS.
Please someone with a brain come up with standards and find a way to force these people to use them. That is the real trick. Its not just microsoft but all the idiots who only develop for whatever the hell is on their computer that they like.
Wish granted (Score:3, Informative)
MPEG-4.
Re:Two problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Writing web pages following the standards is a good thing, but making a complex CSS layout work with some buggy browsers out there is hard. The solution is to not recreate the CSS from scratch, but starting from an already debugged existing layout.
E.g.:
Too many CSS web developers are trying to reinvent the wheel.
Re:Two problems (Score:3, Interesting)
For a long time, everyone used tables to format everything for the web. When they came out with CSS, they went for these abstract DIV tags for formatting... Why didn't they just take and modify the table row/column concept that had been working on 95% of the web? The notation worked, people "got it". Why, exactly, did we have to start from scratch?
~D
Re:Two problems (Score:3, Interesting)
I inherited a web project from a guy who used tables *almost* exclusively -- the almost is the worst, because now I've got TWO recursive trees to run back when making a layout change
He's got
Re:Two problems (Score:3, Interesting)
True, but your blame is misplaced.
CSS isn't perfect, but it's far easier if you wipe away ALL MSIE HACKS (or "browser hacks" if you can't bear to disrespect Microsoft).
I've been working on an internal-use web control panel for a hosting company, and CSS is a breeze. Templates are so much easier to manage, and there's less temptation to inject HTML tags into PHP
Re:Two problems (Score:5, Insightful)
You're halfway right, but only in that decent web designers understand that their pages won't look the same in all browsers. That's the nature of the medium. If you can't truly come to grips with that concept and work with it instead of against it, then you'll never become good.
Again, web is not print, and you're only hurting yourself if you try to treat it as such. Real web design recognizes that users have different browsers, operating systems, plugins, extensions, fonts, sizes, monitors, gamuts, resolutions, DPIs, and so on. It is completely, utterly impossible to make an end run around those differences. Either make a design that scales and flows well on every client you can get your hands on (including Lynx and cell phones), or make a pretty PDF and be done with it.
Re:Two problems (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Two problems (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, I had the crazy notion that technology writers should have some vague understanding of technology. He wrote "If your Internet connection happens to lose a bit of CSS data, you get a mess on your screen." I guess this is the Ted Stevens "leaky tubes" model of internet plumbing. I presume that Dvorak weekly mops under his cable modem to keep leaking bits from staining his floor. (But
Re:Two problems (Score:2)
I must admit to a generally pro-Dvorak bias. He only rarely gets caught up in marketing hype and adds much needed common sense to some ventures. Although he did once claim that Internet access through cable was a stupid idea that would never take off, he is worth reading. Everyone is bound to disa
Re:Two problems (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, he is rather brilliant [slashdot.org], isn't he?
Re:Two problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, CSS has issues, but most of his frustration appears to stem from the fact that he really doesn't know much about CSS.
Experts should be optional (Score:5, Insightful)
He's probably used to HTML. The Web exploded because HTML was easy and anybody could 'get it'. I taught my grandfather HTML over lunch on a sheet of paper in the late 90's. This was good for the web, despite how people bitch and moan about their refined aesthetic sensibilities being offended by amateur GeoCities pages.
Since then the programmers have taken over. HTML documents need to have an XML namespace declaration at the top that most mortals can't remember. The CSS inheritance model is nonsensical, I need a 2-page cheat-sheet to get the syntax right, its designer thinks declaring aliases are 'too complex' and it takes a bona fide css expert to get css positioning working across browsers with a design that survives user-preferred fonts.
I'll start worrying about all this when browsers stop rendering the transitional DTD styled with basic CSS and positioned with tables.
Re:Experts should be optional (Score:5, Insightful)
As a programmer, I would like to distance myself from that - it's the graphic artists who have messed everything up. People who are insistant about they want this font here and that font there and this needs to be 2 pixels to the left but that needs to be mint yellow... The people that want it to "look nice" rather than to work are the culprits!!
Re:Experts should be optional (Score:4, Insightful)
It would appear to me that for the past 5 years, graphic designers have been one of the most technically-literate groups of people out there. They're one of the few demographics that actually "get it" when it comes to things like CSS.
There are some pretty slick sites floating around using nothing but HTML and CSS made by these designers by hand.
and for the record..... CSS is simultaneously one of the best and worst things to happen to the web. Best because it's an amazing tool for ensuring consitency of design, and providing *real* layout control. Worst because the standard was woefully incomplete in its early versions, and implemented differently in every browser.
Re:Experts should be optional (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Experts should be optional (Score:3, Insightful)
They are making the web into something I don't want it to be, so they are wrong.
Wow, that sounds remarkably undemocratic to me. You don't
Re:Experts should be optional (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't see how throwing out 40 years of Human Computer Interaction research lowers any barriers, rather it raises them.
Yes, if your website's only purpose is to reproduce a 1-page magazine ad, go nuts. Though a PDF would be more appropriate for that. If you want people to interact with your website, don't ask designers who are experts in a non-interactive media to suddenly become experts in another field.
Re:Experts should be optional (Score:4, Funny)
You will obey the commands of the Director of Marketing in this, and in all things! Our data shows that the public is not interested in clear, intuitive navigation; nay, they require smileys that appear to trail behind their mouse pointer when it moves! Smileys they shall have, for it has been deemed most Profitable and Right in the eyes of our Lord CEO, He Who Knows All Despite What the IT Dept. Tells Him. He likes the company jingle to play when the pages load, and so does his wife. Praise Him!
Web site creators fall into one of three camps (Score:3, Insightful)
The people that want it to "look nice" rather than to work are the culprits!!
I disagree. The people at fault are those who still think it is 1990 and design and programming are wholly separate disciplines. Camps 1 and 2 need to disappear. Camp 3 is growing fast.
Camp 1: Designers who want eye candy.
Camp 2: Programmers who would prefer that the Web be reduced to square corners, primary colors, dense copy, and no white space.
Camp 3: People who understand that design and programming have to work toget
Re:Experts should be optional (Score:3, Informative)
You don't need that xmlns declaration at the top of the webpage. Yeah, you need it to validate the page--but only programmers care about that. The browser won't shut down if you don't have it.
Programmers have taken over, but an amateur can still do a basic web page or even a complex one w
Re:Experts should be optional (Score:3, Insightful)
So, have you managed to master designs with CSS positioning that work cross-browser and don't fall apart as the font size changes? I'd love to see some examples. I've found a few from the well-known CSS gurus, but the o
Re:Two problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Precisely. The first clue should be when he says:
What the hell is he talking about? Not only is that not CSS's "real benefit", I can't even figure out how he managed to get the idea that this is what CSS is all about. Did he take one look at the CSS Zen Garden and completely miss the point or something?
He can't even get basic facts and terminology right:
Nope, wrong. That's inheritance. The cascade [w3.org] is when you resolve rules found in multiple stylesheets.
You don't "set parameters for style elements" at all. Style elements are instances of the <style> element type, and they are used to include parts of a stylesheet in an HTML or XHTML document. You don't set parameters for elements either. He could be talking about attributes, or perhaps properties, it's hard to tell when his terminology is so muddled.
Finally, this bit is hilarious:
That's right, he's been totally oblivious to CSS, and now, when he starts to learn a bit about it, he blames his ignorance on some sort of conspiracy! That's right, us "techie insiders" have been keeping the truth from you, muhahaha!
Re:Two problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Two problems (Score:2)
Re:Two problems (Score:3, Interesting)
No...Really? You're saying that, if you set something to something, then it stays that way unless you tell it to be something else? And that that's a problem?
Come on! Don't push your own lack of skill off on the tool. If you want to do each page seperately, by all means, go right ahead. Otherwise, learn a little about
CSS doesn't have problems... (Score:3, Interesting)
Mark your calendars (Score:5, Funny)
"Dear Diary,
I don't understand why CSS won't work on my site! OMG, all I want to do is make every div tag on my page 50% transparent, why does it slow things down so much?? Sometimes I think everyone's out to get me. In the end I ended up using Tom's myspace editor, but now I have a link to his page on my page and I don't know how to get rid of it. I hate my life.
-J.D."
Re:Two problems (Score:4, Insightful)
Standard versus Proprietary? (Score:3, Insightful)
I have to agree with him here 100%. Back in my SysOp days running a multinode BBS, I remember the hassles of the design interface -- we had 80 x 25 characters to use and we had (at most!) 2.4K/s download speed. Any remember using TheDraw to animate ANSI? What fun those days were.
All those hours and hours of editing in edlin and then TheDraw and then the RipTerm editor were always a big hassle, but today's multimedia standards are absolutely horrible. Once something finally gets to the ideal stage, it is replaced by something new that doesn't work well. CSS is probably the worst "standard" ever created in terms of design -- the idea is great but I'm starting to see that "freely created" standards are more and more garbage, no matter what the ubergeek thinks.
I'm in the process of starting our CSS layout from scratch for all of our blogs (I hired one graphic designer and have 2 more volunteers). We've spent 40 hours in the last week testing a few ideas on a variety of browsers and they're a mess. I think I should go back to the days of plain-jane HTML and just deal with it, but many people are becoming comfortable with the whole Web 2.0 interface and it is almost expected. I can accept that, but it seems that CSS does more harm than good, especially with the massive number of browsers out there. I really think we should consider each browser application and each version number as a totally seperate entity. I have to keep an entire set of different installs of various browsers (when possible) just to test all the different versions.
I'm a pro-market kind of guy, so I can accept these stumbling blocks because I do know that it is better for the market to have all the competition, buggy or not. Many standards do work eventually, but they have to be replaced because something new was released that everyone wants. I look at Flash (which was mostly proprietary for a long time) and I was much more luckier in designing a flash interfaced site (in terms of compability over the long haul) than I have been with any of the public standards.
I'm wondering: is the future not a public standard but a mess of proprietary ones that may work better, even if they require plug-ins and additional software to work? Standards bodies have NO REASON to try to make something work in even one platform -- they can blame the developer of the platform for the mess. Proprietary formats, on the other hand, often times will see any bugs being blamed on the developer of the format, not the developer of the platform using the format. When Flash first came out, the great majority of problems we had were always blamed on Macromedia, not on IE or Netscape. While I'm not saying this is necessarily an area that competition (of relatively proprietary standards) is the best for the short term, it might be for the long term. Who is competing against CSS in terms of proprietary standards for basic text and graphic layout? Will HTML be replaced by a variety of other formats that require some other application to be bought to create them?
(FWIW, I know that making a good CSS means documenting and comments everywhere -- even when that is done properly there still seem to be a ton of problems across the various platforms. I also have spent time on csszengarden.com for some insight in overcoming the problems).
Re:Standard versus Proprietary? (Score:5, Insightful)
The troubles you are experiencing are not CSS problems, per se, but rather piss-poor browser implementations of CSS. If browsers followed the specs, you'd probably eliminate 99% of the issues right off the bat.
Re:Standard versus Proprietary? (Score:2)
You're right, but this is one of the natural "phenomena" of the market -- no one wants to really follow anyone else's standards. It seems to be a shortcoming, but it allows for new features and options to be released before anyone can "finalize" on a standard. I think this is a Good Thing in some wa
Re:Standard versus Proprietary? (Score:3, Insightful)
Lots of people want to follow other standards. It allows for their product to be interoperable with existing (read: not their own) products. The ones that usually oppose said interoperability are trying to preserve a monopoly on their format.
Ahh, yes. The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
The problem with this approach is that it's a mess. Can you imagine i
Re:Le sigh. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Standard versus Proprietary? (Score:3, Informative)
Works under IE6 and FF1.5
Re:Standard versus Proprietary? (Score:2, Funny)
I'm not so sure that's a coined term yet.
Re:Standard versus Proprietary? (Score:2, Insightful)
so what is the problem with the css standard, exactly? it seems reasonable to me, it's just that some browsers implement it poorly. maybe this is hard, or maybe a common standard for presentation on the web is not in the interests of some dominant browser makers?
assuming "too difficult to implement" is a valid compl
Re:Standard versus Proprietary? (Score:3, Interesting)
As I said in this post [slashdot.org], I have more faith in PDF as a "layout standard" than I do in CSS. My OP talked about Flash and how well it seems to work across every platform on every OS -- here we see two proprietary formats that work better than the open one (let's not even talk about any iteration of HTML and overall compliance).
I know for my "foes" here it j
Re:Standard versus Proprietary? (Score:3, Interesting)
Well...only if said proprietary company supports all browsers on all platforms. I've still got sites I cannot go to using Firefox on Linux because the site requires flash version 8x...and the highest version for linux is 7x...
No..if standards are observed by everyone...everyone should be able to view everything....
This [guitarplayertv.com] is a site that I cannot view for instance...
Re:Standard versus Proprietary? (Score:2)
That's why I'm a fan of Flash. Sure it has its flaws, but you can be assured that if it looks nice in one browser, it'll look nice in all of them the same.
Re:Standard versus Proprietary? (Score:5, Insightful)
For me, all Flash sites look exactly the same: Click here to download plugin.
Sorry, I don't want a plugin that's mostly used to enable advertisers to max out my CPU. Whatever, there's millions of other sites on the web to see. I'll just move on to the next one.
Re:Standard versus Proprietary? (Score:3, Insightful)
The main issue I have with Flash is the fact that - by definition - every single Flash interface is non-standard, which means it takes a nonzero amount of time to figure out how to use, which means I don't get my content as fast as possible. A regular web page typically has about five different ways of scrolling: in Flash, you get as many as the designer could be bothered to program, i.e., one or two. And so on.
Flash is good for one thing and one thing only: looking cool. To be sure, this is a noble goal,
Re:Standard versus Proprietary? (Score:5, Informative)
For me, all Flash sites look exactly the same, too: a little clickable "Play" arrow. If I want the content, I click it; I leave it blocked if (as in most cases) it's an advertisement.
You didn't tell us what browser you use, but if it's in the Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox family, go ahead and download the Flash plugin you've been resisting, and then this Flash Block plugin [mozdev.org] as well.BBS Days (Score:2)
Re:Standard versus Proprietary? (Score:3, Funny)
What are these strange terms you use here...documentin and comments? These are foreign to us here on /.
Edlin? (Score:3)
Re:Standard versus Proprietary? (Score:4, Interesting)
Because that wasn't even more of a mess??
Nested tables, embedded styles everywhere... sure, it works now, but only because the browser developers had so much time to get it to work, and developers have gotten used to it.
It's a horrible way to do layout. You end up with a twisted combination of layout and content - which means your web programmers have to have a bit of graphic design in them, and your graphic designers have to know a little bit about programming. To change something - for example, to move a menu from a horizontal bar at the top to a vertical menu on the right side - requires a ton of work. For a complex enough design, it may mean starting over, because you're 12 tables deep and are losing track of the row because there's too many rowspan=3's. Not to mention, there's no easy way to make a "print" or accessable version without having a whole separate layout.
Using CSS, you get a nice clean HTML layout. In fact, it's almost to the point where a web designer can be responsible for the CSS, and the programmer for the HTML*. Going back to the previous example, if your menu is in a div, and defined with an unordered list, then to move that navbar it's only a matter of changing the CSS. Don't need to touch the HTML (or corresponding server-side code that generates it) at all.
A nice thing about developing this way is the page is viewable before even putting in the CSS. In fact, it can be viewed easily by ANY browser (albeit without formatting) including text-based browsers and even the first generation web browsers. Making a printable version is just a matter of another stylesheet (and if you use the 'cascade' properly, you can have one that sets up the main layout, and one that modifies that for print, or one main, and two that inherit with specific changes - one for screen, one for print). Screen readers will have no problem with it. Search engines will index it easily.
Now, yes, it does have a learning curve. It takes a lot of reading to understand layout in CSS, as well as CSS in general. Current web developers often think "I know web development, I can do CSS" then get frustrated because things don't work (case in point, the original article). Really, they haven't bothered to learn it. There are a ton of great sites out there to help with this, and a couple google searches will find them. It's not something that happens overnight though, it takes a fair bit of reading and experimenting.
* There's still a few 'hacks' that are sometimes required to make the CSS work (ie, adding a 'wrapper div' around certain things), but these will hopefully be addressed eventually in newer versions of CSS. There's also the issue of IE
If IE7 does actually work, I would hope that the web would basically go to a "your browser is too old to view this page, please upgrade..." and provide links to firefox, IE7, and opera or whatever. I normally hate browser detection, but the faster we get rid of IE5/6 the better.
Can you read my mind? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dvorak is waiting for DPSS.
Ever since we began using CSS for handling the visuals on our reporting platform we've had a much easier time making a big splash with clients. In the past just giving a new look and feel was all that was needed to appease the vast majority of clients; in spite of the data shown being exactly the same. Sure CSS requires effort, and as I read through the W3C's documentation I don't see them make the claim that CSS is necessarily easy on its own. Instead, the combination of tools (HTML and CSS) make presentation easier to update and shape.
DPSS (Designer Perceptive Style Sheets) should be ready in the next 50 to 100 years though. So, Mr. Dvorak, hold out just a bit longer and you can just think it, and it will be done.
Instead, Mr. D, rant about how the different browsers (IE6 rules!) failed to follow a published standard. The largest obstacles in web development are not the individual elements, but the containers. Having to do the same thing 3 different ways is obscene. On that, we agree.
What's the alternative? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is not with the CSS standard, the problem is with implementations of that standard. IE has been on a different planet for years when it comes to implementing standards. It's kind of laugable that there's the "Microsoft CSS standard," then there's the real CSS standard.
Firefox does better, and unlike Microsoft, they're actually trying. (And making a damn good effort of it, IMHO, it's actually really close from what I can tell.)
I don't have much experience with Opera, but I haven't had much trouble with it when dealing with CSS.
Remember several years ago when several car manufacturers got busted for putting bad tires on new cars? No one argued that having tires on cars was a broken idea. The same is true in this case. Don't ditch CSS, just fix the friggin' browsers.
Besides, what exactly is the alternative? Putting style tags on each element? For one thing, you'll run into the same problems, and for another, I'm confused as to how that is easier than using CSS. Going back to tag-level formatting? No thanks. Frankly, that was a hideous idea when they came up with it the first time.
It was a nice rant, though, but misdirected.
Re:What's the alternative? (Score:4, Insightful)
Now that I've waded through all that and used it for years, I still have gripes, the biggest being that your choices for layout are basically "proportional" and "fixed", with no options in between for "wide enough to fit this table column at whatever font size the user has specified." (I write web applications that basically deal with tabular views of data, so dealing with tables is a BIG part of my day, and I'm not talking about trying to make bits and pieces of pictures line up using them). If I try fixed width, then if someone increases their font size past what I tested with, it begins to wrap around and look ugly. If I try specifying proportions, then no matter what I do, I end up with columns that consist of a checkbox or a two digit number that take up 1/10th of the width of the screen and again looks ugly. If I try using table tags and letting the browser render it however it likes, then users end up with basically random screens depending on how the browser was feeling that day, and hitting reload causes the entire page to render differently.
Re:What's the alternative? (Score:5, Informative)
(It gets even more complicated with the notion of "font families", but I don't understand the distinction there, either.)
Underlining, on the other hand, is just something you do to it; there isn't any "Times Roman Underlined". That makes it a property of the text, not of the font or face. You don't need a designer to add it.
It sucks that you need such details to do something that you get just by pushing a button in every WYSIWIG word processor in the world. What we need, and what I haven't seen yet, is a WYSIWIG designer for CSS. I envision something equivalent to what Word and OpenOffice call "character styles", but frankly most people don't use them even when they're available.
And Word/OpenOffice still lack (for the most part) an equivalent of CSS layout, which is the part I still find hard. As you point out, CSS's box model seems to be missing some really basic ideas, and that causes many people to just say, "This is 300 pixels wide and it looks fine at a font size I'm comfortable reading and I don't want to f*** with it any more."
Re:What's the alternative? (Score:2)
I don't suppose you ever tried tag-level formatting + generated code.
Sure, it works just fine. CSS just separates the content from the markup and makes my life easier. I use it for pretty much everything and there is only one thing really wrong with it, IE. I tag pages by hand and auto-generate a huge pile as well. It all looks great and is a cinch to make style changes to. Firefox, Opera, Safari, and everything else we test with all handle it just fine, except IE which gracefully degrades to show the sa
Dvorak, IT's own Andy Rooney (Score:5, Funny)
Ah yes, material for years.
Extremely Funny? (Score:5, Funny)
The only reason I use CSS is because color coordination does not run in my genes.
Whycome? (Score:5, Funny)
Dat jus not fair.
This just in.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, this is actually a bit funny, but not in a humorous editorial column way. More of a sad "son hits dad in the groin with a baseball bat on 'Funniest Home Videos'" sort of way.
Solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Solution (Score:2)
That is an insanely wonderful idea, and I
Re:Solution (Score:3, Insightful)
So do it for your non-commercial work. Don't turn them away, just disable all CSS and JavaScript and give them the plain HTML. Include a big notice at the top with conditional comments telling them that their browser is broken and that is why they are getting the retard-friendly version instead of the high quality version everybody else is getting, and provide links to other browsers.
Sure, you'll lose some user
Re:Solution (Score:5, Funny)
If the user's running IE, redirect to a page that says something to the effect of:
Turnabout is, after all, fair play.
Re:Solution (Score:5, Interesting)
Explorer Destroyer [explorerdestroyer.com]
interactive transcript (Score:5, Funny)
John Dvorak: played by a angry, crying, screaming Horatio Sanz
Normal Human: played by you (unless you are John Dvorak)
Dvorak: CSS IS STUPID!! I CAN'T MAKE IT WORK SO IT SUCKS!!! STUPID STANDARDS BODIES!!! WHY DON'T THEY MAKE ALL THE BROWSERS WORK THE SAME?!?!? WHY!?!?!
Normal Human: Uhm, John. The standards bodies aren't in charge of the browsers. And lot's of people use CSS on sites that look practically identical on all the major browsers.
Bvorak: NO THEY DON'T. I CAN'T MAKE IT WORK, SO IT SUCKS!!!
Normal Human: Maybe if you bought a good book on CSS. Something by Eric Meyer...
DVORAK!: BUT IT CASCADES!!!
Normal Human: It's suppopsed to cascade. Just calm down.
DVORAK!!!: A BEAR ATE MY PARENTS!!!!
Normal Human:
DVORAK!?!?!: KHAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!!
Normal Human: I hate you.
Learn2Code (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not so bad (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, and there are of course the IE-specific CSS bugs to bear in mind too - http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer.html [positioniseverything.net]
CSS is a Dream (Score:2, Interesting)
a. Explorer (but you learn some work arounds)
b. They don't know what they're doing and are unwilling to learn (it's a paradigm shift as they say)
Of course, learning it from a good source makes all the difference.
I use CSS for layouts and for type (and for print.) It's a breeze. I recently had to do a quick update of an old site that used tables. It was a horrible,
He's blaming the wrong group... (Score:5, Insightful)
What? So, the reason why CSS renders differently on each browser is because of the standards bodies?
In other news: The POSIX standard is why Linux isn't the top operating system. The SQL standard is why every database works slightly differently (enough to trip you up). The 802.11a/b/g standards are why wireless can be a pain to set up...
Hahahhaahaha (Score:2)
Thank you CmdrTaco. You just made my day.
Internet Connection Losing CSS data??? WTF??? (Score:5, Funny)
When does that happen? When the web server times out because the CSS is too big to host out? Or when Dvorak's AOL connection kicks him off because his free 100 minutes has run out?
C'mon...
Re:Internet Connection Losing CSS data??? WTF??? (Score:5, Funny)
It's when there's a hole in one of the tubes, all the CSS starts to leak out.
Re:Internet Connection Losing CSS data??? WTF??? (Score:3, Funny)
Extremely funny? For whom? (Score:2)
John Dvorak was mildly amusing in the mid-80's when I first ran into his column. Back then he would italicize the important bits which was entertaining, but after a while it just became a bit too much. This is more of the same, only twenty years later.
John, CSS uses inheritance -- it's a pretty advanced idea that egghead nerds are fine with, so just deal with it. As an earlier post says, a much better use of your time would be to complain about why browsers don't display the same page the same way -- if yo
As most readers know, I'm a blogger. (Score:5, Funny)
That's like saying, "As most readers know, I am a computer operator."
CSS stands for Conspicuously Sketchy Sheets
Here's a tutorial John - http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_intro.asp [w3schools.com]
Damn Right (Score:5, Insightful)
CSS in principle is a good idea, and in practice, even in its current state, is a great improvement on the alternative, but the fact remains that in order to do a non trivial design that works across all in-use browsers it is going to take a lot of work. To do this in a standard way (without relying on browser quirks) takes more work still. Not particularly hard work, but can be very time consuming. Granted, this is the fault of the implementations, but that is a bit of a moot point to the person who has to spend the hours trying to remove a 1 pixel gap from the side on image in ie, without breaking the appearance in firefox.
As a professional web developer, I rarely am meet with issues that I have any difficultly understanding, the problems come when you design an elegant solution for a problem, implement 99% of it, then find some bug in one of the technologies used requires you to throw it all out and start again, rushing a ugly and hard to maintain solution in order to meet deadlines and avoid the broken bits. Experience help to avoid this, but when you multiply the amount of technologies typical in a web project (server, db, client side scripting, server side scripting, content (html), display (css)) etc. by the number of implementation that may be used for each one, factoring in the rate of change these technologies go through, it become impossible to be ready for all possible limitations/ errors in implementation.
Re:Damn Right (Score:5, Insightful)
CSS was designed for content-based pages, not image-based pages. It is the marriage of a content-specific styling mechanism with an "OMG I need this pixel-precise and exactly matching the colors I see on my mis-tuned CRT with my ultra-tiny font sizes because I never set my system DPI properly" mentality of image-based layouts, predominately springing from graphic designers with their roots and training in a paper-based world, that causes the problems. Stop and realize that CSS is designed to deal with screen sizes from 4" to 56", font sizes from 6pt to 66pt, DPIs from 40 to 350, languages from right-to-left English to BIDI combinations of Latin and Hebrew, text-based terminals to LCD-based graphical terminals to CRT-based graphical terminals to pure-audio sans-graphics terminals, and CSS manages to have a single unified language for dealing smoothly with all of these in a single styling system, and be downright ashamed at your small-minded pixed-based layout woes.
Have you ever tested your pages with a default font size of 8pt and 17pt? On systems with a DPI of 67 and 148? Do you take your pretty page, un-maximize the browser window, grab a corner, and wave it around like mad to make sure that your layout doesn't break no matter what the window dimensions are? Do you put your page on a 21" monitor with 120 DPI and maximize it, to make sure you are not leaving 70% of the window as wasted blank space? (::cough:: cnn.com
Re:Damn Right (Score:3, Insightful)
On the one hand, yes, clients spending that kind of dough want things to look a certain way. The easiest way is to use image-based, fixed pixel layouts, etc. However, that is not the best way to do it, for the reasons cited previously in this thread. Usually that may be the only way to do it within budget, therefore making it the appropriate way, but from my experience, the only reason that doing it in a 'fixed' way versus a flexible way is bec
Re:Damn Right (Score:3, Interesting)
I completely understand and agree with what you have said. I am of the set of professionals who use the most appropriate methodology for the task at hand. I'll use PERL to do large regular expression string manipulations if it's a requirement but I won't insist upon it to do simple form validation routines where a PHP library on the server and javascript client side will do the job 100%. I'll require that my htm
Savor the irony (Score:4, Funny)
This is why I couldn't stomach web programming! (Score:5, Interesting)
Coding web pages makes me violently ill.
Back in 2003, I decided to learn web programming. In the process, I learned to hand-code HTML, CSS, Javascript, Java, SQL, and PHP. PHP, I can handle, because it's simple and straight-forward and designed to make back-end writing easy (although I understand that there have been some developments with Ruby since then). SQL makes sense, since it's specialized for database manipulation.
But when it comes to developing front-end web content, I just cannot justify using three different languages for one thing. I mean, I do understand the idea behind specializing languages (PHP vs. SQL), so in the abstract, I see a reason for making a separation between structure/content (HTML) and formatting (CSS). I just have a visceral reaction to having to use two different languages with two different syntaxes at once in this context. Embedding SQL in PHP doesn't bother me. For some reason, CSS and HTML bother me. I think it's because I feel like they're haphazzardly slapped together and FORCED to get along. PHP and SQL have no relation. Each is designed for its function. HTML evolved from a structural markup language into a total mess, and then CSS was invented as a bandaid. Along the way, no one ever thought to actually unify them. And then there's Javascript.
CSS, HTML, Javascript, and Java each has its own different name for each kind of DOM object. WTF!
If you want to do the full gamut of web front-end programming, you have to learn four names for every object or attribute!
What were these people thinking?
They weren't.
And it's never going to get better. 100 years from now, web programming will be tainted by the legacy evolutionary path everything went through.
Just wait for the Semantic Web. Yet another syntax to learn. No unification AT ALL.
The alternative... (Score:4, Interesting)
HTML came out of SGML and the academic community. It was designed to deliver, get this, text _and_ images in the same document on the Internet! So cool! People were supposed to write their web pages in a text editor and then PUT their documents on the webserver. But PUT was not secure or powerful enough so enter webdav.
CSS is great! I have no complaints about the CSS/HTML dicotamy. And things will only get better with time. The problem with CSS is Internet Explorer. But I'm not going to beat that horse.
The web came so fast, and so many people were thinking about it that it produced an explosion of technologies, each trying to deliver something new. Now days we are sorting it all out, keeping whats good and letting the bad fade.
It's only been 15 years of the web. Can you imagine the world without it? I'd say things are pretty good.
Kind Regards
Every Time Dvorak Speaks (Score:5, Funny)
Whole PC world: It doesn't work and nobody cares (Score:5, Insightful)
Computers with sixteen-slot S-100 busses that couldn't possibly drive sixteen cards.
The Apple ][ which had no fan. The first time I saw one, I said, "Wow! they must have brilliant thermal engineers." Then the owner explained that the reason why the cover was off was that if he put the cover on it would overheat and shut down. They didn't have brilliant thermal engineers: they didn't know that they needed thermal engineers.
I remember a guy who kept talking about how wonderful his North Star Advantage was. I asked him if it was reliable. He said, absolutely, he had had no problems with it whatsoever. So the next time I was in his office, I asked for a demo. "Oh, I can't," he said. "The power supply burned out last month." "But," I said, "I thought you said you hadn't had any problems with it." "I haven't had any problems with the computer," he said. "Just the power supply."
And that, in a nutshell, is the way the PC industry has been since its inception. CSS is just one of many examples. People tried to achieve consistent appearance with HTML, and couldn't because it wasn't designed for that and different browsers rendered it differently. So, they invented CSS, whose whole reason for existence is to allow Web pages to be written to a standard that will be rendered consistently by all browsers. And it doesn't really work, and nobody cares.
How about all those USB devices whose instructions tell you never to plug them into a hub?
How about all the CDs that burn and verify without error... and can then be read in about 95% of all CD readers?
How about all the Bluetooth thingies that won't interoperate properly with other Bluetooth thingies?
How about all the Windows releases, each of which is going to solve the security and usability problems of the previous releases?
It goes on and on... but it doesn't matter because nobody expects the stuff to work any more...
My Article: Why Dvorak Bugs Me? (Score:4, Funny)
- His articles don't follow the standards. Typically, and article posted online is supposed to be interesting, informative, and be written by a well educated man. This article follows none of those standards.
- His article was supposed to be dynamic. But every time I read the damn thing it's stil the same old boring Sh!t.
Re:Silly Dovak (Score:2, Funny)
Re:The age of Vista? (Score:5, Funny)
It's a logical necessity. Starting with "As we approach the age of Vista" logically predicates the following statements on the assumption we are approaching an "Age of Vista".
This allows us to say anything we please, because of the well known logical rule having to do with statements predicated on falsehood.
Example:
"As we approach the Age of Vista, engines powered by quantum singularities willreplace internal combustion."
"But, the internal combustion engine is still here!"
"Is it the Age of Vista?" "No."
"Well, then."