At 08:23 PM 3/8/2006, Ben Buchanan wrote:
That's pretty much the rub of it all, for me! :) If only Microsoft had created a proprietary comment system for CSS, at least it would have been useful without so many downsides.
That so typifies Microsoft's schizophrenia. They're such a large organization, they must have hundreds if not thousands of creative directions happening simultaneously: hordes of brilliant geeks, impossible to wrangle. It's such a shame that they weren't on the web standards page early enough to foresee the importance of separating presentation from content from logic. Convert the latest Word or Excel document to HTML and you'll see the worst practices rampant.
Earlier this century I scrambled from the leaky rowboat of ASP onto the running board of the steam locomotive of ASP.Net, then immediately realized I was only penetrating farther into the murky tunnel of death. The .Net technology seemed to merge logic with markup and style even more densely than before, keyed particularly to IE's quirks, making it more difficult, not easier, to achieve decent web standards with Microsoft's proprietary technology. Who knows, perhaps I was short-sighted and those who have plunged deeply into .Net have found ways to separate them cleanly, but I don't for a moment regret my decision to leap from the sinking Microsoft tanker to the skimming PHP skiff. PHP doesn't require clean separation but it sure as hell helps us achieve it.
I wonder how our work would be different today if the designers of CSS had foreseen the chaos that's resulted from our trying to get styles to work cross-browser. Would they have built browser-version-conditional branching into CSS? I doubt it. Browser-sniffers are only as dependable as the browsers' willingness not to spoof, which is to say not much. And we'd still be hacking our way around browsers written early enough not to know how to respond to the conditional branching. Back to square one.
It's unnerving to realize that the crazy-quilt world we live in may actually be the best of all probable worlds.
Paul
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