On 06/10/2010 01:27, Stewart Gordon wrote:
On 04/10/2010 19:42, Walter Bright wrote:
Stewart Gordon wrote:
The layout breaks in anything but the default text zoom.
The annoying thing about this is everyone says "don't use tables for
layout, use CSS." Except that using CSS for layout DOESN'T WORK
RELIABLY. With tables, I can get 3 columns that are actually 3 columns,
not 3 columns that are a side effect of bugs in CSS.
Indeed, here are just a few things I hate to bits about CSS:
- no overflow: grow
- overflow: grow isn't the default
- width and height mean the width and height excluding the padding
http://goingspare.wordpress.com/2007/04/06/css-padding-and-width/
Stewart.
I had about 3 jousts with CSS and HTML layout stuff, quite some years
ago (around 3-5 years). CSS is great for setting up the style of the
page (as in colors, fonts, font properties, etc.)... but for layout, it
sucks a lot! It's the C++ of markup languages, if not worse.
My first joust was me trying to alter the template I got for my homepage
to use divs/css instead of tables. I tried a few things, but never
managed to make it show up the way I wanted in both IE 6 and Firefox. I
gave up and left the template with tables, and here the blame was put
solely on browsers issues, since it seemed IE 6 was not being standards
compliant most of the time. (even with the HTML version set to 4, so
that IE would not try compatibility hacks for old HTML versions) . Note
that on this first attempt I had only read some simple CSS tutorials,
and I had no knowledge of how things should render, only intuition (and
the latest Firefox as a sort of reference).
Fast forward 6 months later or something like that. After reading about
someone lauding CSS2, I decide to have another go. This time I read a
lot about HTML/CSS2, hoping do understand it properly, and to actually
be able to figure how the layout should look like (because at the time
even Firefox had some prominent layout bugs). It was an utter mess
again. Even with a a better understanding of CSS, all the code I tried
never worked properly in both browsers. Now for some of that code I knew
for sure that the problem was that IE was not being standards compliant,
and why (even though in some case its behavior seemed the most logical
one).
After much trial-and-error, learning about the quirks of each browser,
hair-pulling, I finally managed to get a working layout (with a few
minor concessions in the original intended functionality). But here even
though there were faults in the browsers, I became of the opinion that
that CSS/HTML layout itself was extremely complicated, and was actually
more at fault than the browsers issues (hence the comment of "C++ of
markup languages").
The confirmation of that came a year later, when again I delved into
HTML layout. This time, I wanted to create a HTML page exactly emulating
the Europass CV template (which, for those not familiar, is actually
fairly more complicated than the typical resume layout, especially to
render the separating lines). I found that:
a) I had practically forgotten all the CSS/HTML rules and info that I
had "learned" before, because they were so strange, complicated, and
*unnatural* that there is now way you remember them unless you work with
it on a daily basis.
b) Even though now I only cared about it rendering properly in the
latest Firefox (it was mostly for internal use only), and so I had no
more browser incompatibilities, I still had lots of trial-and-error and
hair pulling. I became completely dissatisfied with HTML/CSS layout...
it has definitely gained the "crap" designation from me.
--
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer
