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[Nick Sabalausky]

"Arlo White" <awhite at calpoly.edu> wrote in message 
news:i8gem3$20al$1 at digitalmars.com...
> 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.
>

I seem to have met my doppleganger ;) Seriously, if I didn't know better I'd 
have to check the "From" line to know I hadn't written that myself.

Welcome to the Amish-of-programming club. We're small, but growing ;)