Re^2: Your kung fu is excellent but what about...

I sympathise with your cynicism and generally agree with your point about the 'next big thing'.

I have to admit, though, that I have been seduced by the XHTML fanatics.

One reason was the realisation of what w3c actually meant when they darkly refer to 'other devices' and 'alternative presentation'.

For many years I was convinced that you only had to worry about screens that were 800 pixels or wider, there being so few screens smaller than that. Was that a mistake! Seeing the web site I help maintain on a 1500px laptop was a bit of a shock too! What's happened to all my lovely gifs? Replaced with xhtml/css2 that's what! Screens are simultaneously getting smaller and bigger very quickly.

A bit of the future is already with us.

It also dawned on this Neanderthal that another 'other device' was audio browsers and what they do, for instance, with tables. I've long been an advocate of "don't use tables for page layout" but now I'm convinced.

For a static site in particular these issues are far easier to deal with using the latest standards. Also, if you're planning to move to dynamically produced pages (as I am) having a compliant site in the first place will make the transition much less painful.

One thing that does underline your point is frames. I would cheerfully shoot the person who thought that was a good idea and break the legs of the person who left me with a framed site. Search engines don't like them, they interfere with the back button, links to and from your site can produce 'unexpected behaviour' and you're left with tricky dicky javascript on every page. I'm proposing and campaigning for the frames to be dropped but they've had them for 6 years or so and they are stubborn (you'd get on well with them!).

I welcome the attempt to move toward more strict standards. I believe that whatever the future does hold will have less traumatic consequences if these standards are supported and adhered too.

I also applaud you intransigence. These things often end up being some sort of fashion parade where the 'label' is all important. Keep up the good work!

Comment on Re^2: Your kung fu is excellent but what about...

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Re^3: Your kung fu is excellent but what about... by tilly (Archbishop) on Dec 13, 2004 at 16:01 UTC
This is fair enough, but I haven't used frames in many years. (You're right, frames suck.) As for moving to dynamically produced pages, well I have predominately dealt with dynamically produced pages from day 1. (I'm primarily a Perl programmer, I consider web work very secondary.) My comments are made in that context. As far as I'm concerned, the biggest way that dynamic differs from static is that you can automate repetitive stuff in a template. (In fact you pretty much have to.) This gives you design options that static does not. I grant that CSS is designed to display better on very small screens and audio displays. I've never been told that making that work is a business requirement. OTOH in trying to discourage tables for layout, the CSS folks made using tables far more of a PITA than it has any right to be. As far as I'm concerned, I should be able to stick a style on a row and have it apply to the cells in the table. Sorry, it doesn't work that way. Now we can go through the arguments for/against using tables all day long. Let me just say that every few assignments I wind up having to display a tabular report. (Could that be because I'm dealing with data??? And tabular tables are a natural representation of it? Just possibly...) And every time I find that the design of CSS gets in my way.	[reply]
Re^4: Your kung fu is excellent but what about... by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Dec 21, 2004 at 05:58 UTC
As far as I'm concerned, I should be able to stick a style on a row and have it apply to the cells in the table. Sorry, it doesn't work that way. `<style type="text/css">tr.highlight td { font-weight: bold; }</style> <table> <tr class="highlight"><td>This is bold.</td></tr> </table>` [download] Now we can go through the arguments for/against using tables all day long. Let me just say that every few assignments I wind up having to display a tabular report. If anyone is trying to get you not to use tables for displaying tabular data, they don't know what they're talking about. Tables are deprecated as a layout crutch, not when used for their actual purpose. They'd've gone the way of the `font` tag in recent specs if they were inherently evil — except they haven't. Makeshifts last the longest.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^5: Your kung fu is excellent but what about... by tilly (Archbishop) on Dec 21, 2004 at 07:20 UTC
Thanks, I just learned something. I have no idea why it has to be written that way rather than another (I'd expect the class to just distribute in the obvious way), but I'll definitely make use of the trick.	[reply]
Re^6: Your kung fu is excellent but what about... by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Dec 21, 2004 at 07:34 UTC
Re^7: Your kung fu is excellent but what about... by tilly (Archbishop) on Dec 21, 2004 at 07:44 UTC
Re^4: Your kung fu is excellent but what about... by Anonymous Monk on Dec 13, 2004 at 16:16 UTC
You must have a different definition of "static" vs "dynamic" pages than I have. I've always used "dynamic" for pages that are generated on demand (CGI, mod_perl, whatever), while "static" pages are created in advance (and served for instance from a filesystem or database). I'm a bit puzzled about what you mean by "static pages". From you description, I gather you can use templates when creating a "static page". Which makes me wonder, what in your opinion is a static page?	[reply]
Re^5: Your kung fu is excellent but what about... by tilly (Archbishop) on Dec 13, 2004 at 16:30 UTC
Somewhere between what I intended to say and what you understood, something important got reversed. Possibly it was my poor choice of wording. I mean dynamic the same way that you do, and what I was saying is that templates are an option on dynamically generated pages, but not on static ones. Therefore if you're developing a dynamic site, you have design options that you don't if you have a static one. Technically that is not entirely true (you can use templates in a "make"-like step with static sites - Template Toolkit has explicit support for this), but exceptions tend to be rare.	[reply]