Re: Is the end of HTML as we know it?

On 2007-11-07, dorayme wrote:
In article <f5o905-156.ln1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Chris F.A. Johnson" <cfajohnson@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2007-11-07, dorayme wrote:
In article <654905-753.ln1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Chris F.A. Johnson" <cfajohnson@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2007-11-07, Ed Jensen wrote:

I'm not trying to start a "table based layouts" vs. "CSS based
layouts" war here, I'm just sharing my personal experience: Web sites
designed with table based layouts seem to handle it reasonably well
when I increase the text size. Web sites designed with CSS based
layouts seem to rarely handle it gracefully. YMMV.

That is not a function of tables versus CSS; it's a matter of good
coding versus bad coding.

Perhaps so. But Ed Jensen has another complaint that has been
partly dealt with but is probably interesting enough to deserve
more. Namely, that the tools used to do the good and bad coding
are unnecessarily as poor as they are.

They are no worse than, for example, a car, which one can use for
speeding and ignoring rules of the road just as easily as for
driving sensibly.

If this analogy was even remotely apt,

You can substitute any tool you like; the analogy still applies.

there would be far more accidents on the road than there are.

If web developers had to qualify to put up a web site (not that I'm
recommending it), there would be a similar reduction in bad
'drivers' on the web.

In fact, what strikes one, in so many countries, is that things are
as orderly as they are, that drivers are, by and large as
predictable and sensible as they are. There are reasons for this and
none of them apply to the world wild west of websites.

If as many web developers knew the 'rules of the road' for HTML and
CSS as know it for driving cars, the WWW would be a much better
place.

The truth is that it is not easy to make really good websites and
if you think it is, you are talking from the advantage of having
mastered sufficient skills to achieve simplicity and competence
in design.

We've had this discussion before, and I disagree that it is hard
to make a good web site.

The problem of why there are so many bad websites is a
complicated problem. It is not because the tools are so poorly
designed,

That's what I was saying.

nor because it is so unregulated nor a lot of other
things. It is a combination of many things.



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

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