I've yet to experience a real-world case where the factoring of concerns with stylesheets even remotely begins to match the way that I'd like to operate. As long as the standard does not address my needs, and there are no concrete plans to actually remove widely-used but deprecated features, I'll feel free to ignore the XHTML nazis.

Conversely when it comes to the old Perl code that you post, my objections to it are not that it is dated, but rather that it sets you up for a variety of problems. (eg You've got missing error checks and have made errors hard to debug, you've made multiple instances of the same field harder to display, you don't get the benefit of typo-checking from strict.pm...)

These benefits make sense to me. But the stylesheets lecture does not. Sure, it separates some presentation from content. But I can get a more flexible separation from using any templating tool - and if I'm going to develop a complex website I have to use the templating tool anyways. Furthermore stylesheets never seem to allow me to divide control in the way that I want to divide it.

Then there is the argument that things like XHTML are the future. Well argument that, You have to use this because it is the future! has always failed to impress me. If it is the future then I'll discover that in the future. But it won't become the future unless it delivers concrete enough benefits that people switch. Until I begin hearing about those benefits and get convinced by them, I'll ignore them.

Call me cynical. But over the years there has never been a shortage of platforms and standards promising to be the future. Most are trivia questions 5 years later. Some achieve modest success. And only a handful transform the world. Transforming the world takes long enough that it is pretty easy to notice and react long before it happens. (Unless you're embedded in a business model where your customers won't let you react, see The Innovator's Dilemma for more on that.)

Disclaimer. I've never has any enthusiasm for this whole "web" thing, and so can't bring myself to feel any passion about "doing it right".

In reply to Re: Your kung fu is excellent but what about... by tilly
in thread Your kung fu is excellent but what about... by Your Mother

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