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Posted by Geoff Berrow on 11/23/97 11:42
Message-ID: <44184d86$1@kcnews01> from Joseph Kesselman contained the
following:
>Martin Underwood wrote:
>> HTML isn't meant to be a page layout language - my question is "why isn't
>> it?".
>
>Because that isn't what it was designed to be.
>
>The original assumption was that styling/rendering would be handled by
>the browser, and you'd pick/configure a browser to suit your own
>preferred formatting styles.
>
>Unfortunately, people who didn't understand this concept began abusing
>the HTML to try to control rendering. And some of the browser authors
>exacerbated that by adding styling features to their pre-standardization
>dialects of HTML... and then, when HTML *was* standardized, the
>standards committee was unwilling/unable to break those establieshed
>(bad) practices.
And this is really all you need to say. We also know that Microsoft has
totally destroyed sensible email communication with its Outlook products
and that Betamax was better than VHS.
I have a lot of sympathy for the purist view - I think the aims are
laudable and support them. But I've recently been doing some scripting
for a web design company who are stacked out with work. And the reason
they are stacked out with work is their locked down pixel perfect crisp
design. Bad practice it may be but these guys are delivering what the
customer wants. And unless you can manage to change things through
legislation the customer will continue to decide how web pages should
look and perform.
--
Geoff Berrow 0110001001101100010000000110
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