Posted by Chris F.A. Johnson on 11/10/07 21:56

On 2007-11-10, 1001 Webs wrote:
> On Nov 10, 7:20 pm, "André Gillibert"
....
>> But, most CSS developers are highly ignorant, and have fundamentally wrong
>> design principles, such as "it should render identically eveywhere".
>
> I fail to see what's "fundamentally wrong" with that.

It is impossible, that's why.

> It is a basic graphic design principle.

For paper, perhaps. On the Web, you _cannot_ know exactly how a
page will look in every browser, not even in all copies of the
same browser.

> When you design a magazine or newspaper for example, every page should
> look the same in terms of structure.

The Web is not paper.

> You can play with the headers, image positioning, etc. but all pages
> should follow the same pattern.

Which, on the better sites, they do.

> That's why you use Templates and grids.

Exactly.

>> Bad news: I've to use many web sites that've been designed by ignorant web
>> designers.
>> If CSS didn't exist or was harder to use by bad web designers, I wouldn't
>> get all that bad stuff.
> And if CSS was better implemented and was easier to use by every web
> designers, you will get even less bad stuff.

That's like trying to make a car that cannot go through a red light,
that cannot exceed the speed limit, that cannot have a misaligned
mirror, etc.....

>> That's true to a much larger extent for
>> JavaScript. 99% of the JavaScript of the web is harmful or at best useless.
>> I often disable author's CSS, but, unfortunately, there're more and more
>> pages that become hard to read without author's CSS.
>>
>> > While there's some truth to that argument, at some point you need to
>> > be pragmatic. If 99% of the web developers out there are getting it
>> > wrong, maybe the tool needs to be more user friendly.
>>
>> No, it's misused BECAUSE it's too friendly. You don't need to read any
>> spec to use it!
>> e.g. WISYWIG editors worsen the thing.
> I beg to differ.

Differ from what?

> Many of those tags are useless and not recommended,
> so why on Earth are they allowed?

Who is going to disallow them? And how?

There are many tags that are deprecated or not allowed in HTML
4.01, for example, but browsers still support them because of the
millions of legacy pages on the WWW.

> Could you please tell me what's the use of, for example font-size:
> 10px; ?

To make the text unreadably small (or too large).

>> In the "CSS is a car" analogy, I would say that, you need a driver license
>> to drive a car (because it's powerful and dangerous) but you don't need a
>> license to use the powerful and dangerous CSS. Imagine if 3 years old
>> children were allowed to drive a car without license?
> Even if you have a CSS license you can easily go wrong.

Just as in a car.

....

--
Chris F.A. Johnson, webmaster <http://Woodbine-Gerrard.com>
===================================================================
Author:
Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (2005, Apress)

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