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).
