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Arlo White awhite at calpoly.edu
Tue Oct 5 17:08:12 PDT 2010


That's because HTML/CSS is a pretty terrible language for anything 
beyond simple layouts. It shares more with Word/PDF/PostScript in terms 
of its purpose and history than it does with real gui layout engines 
(GTK, QT, etc).

Hardcore HTML/CSS people tout the virtues of separating the content from 
the presentation. The problem is that HTML has implicit presentation 
that you often can't override with CSS. There are limits to what you can 
do with positioning. If I want to rearrange elements in my page I have 
to change the HTML, I can't do it all on the CSS side. That's not 
separation of content from presentation!

Real separation of the presentation has to happen right at the data 
layer. But that's server side in most applications. So you run your data 
through one view abstraction (template language such as Freemarker, PHP, 
JSP etc), then to HTML, and then polish it with CSS. Oh, and that 
application runs on an app server that runs in a Java virtual machine 
that runs in an VMware OS that runs on a real OS that actually accesses 
real hardware. That's an absurd number of layers...

Anyway, to get back to HTML. They'll say use divs not tables because a 
table represents a distinct concept not a layout element and it has 
accessibility implications. And yet I you can't layout things with divs 
in the same way that I can with a table. And even if there are obscure 
CSS properties that let me, half the user's browsers don't support them.

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one that sees the naked Emperor. 
People are so excited about the Internet but they don't realize that 
browsers are just implementing one view language that's 15 years old and 
really isn't all that great. The beauty of the Internet is the emergent 
properties that arose from the concept of linking sites. But that's not 
something that has to be unique to the HTML language itself.

And sure there's some cool stuff in HTML5 but a pig's still a pig even 
when you velcro a TV to its head and a database on its back.


-Arlo




On 10/04/2010 02:23 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>
> That's what bugs me. Something as straightforward as a 3 column layout
> shouldn't require "tricks" for it. Googling it found 3 pages dedicated
> to explaining this "trick" (each of them wildly different, of course).
>




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