Re^3: Your kung fu is excellent but what about...

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.

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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
That confirms my suspicions that most people rag on CSS out of ignorance rather than having valid criticism… `:-)` To be fair, I also have yet to see any suitable introductory material for it that managed to convey how to think CSS in simple and clear terms. It took me a very long time to grok some of its aspects, and not even subtle ones at that, simply due to the lack of good material about it. What I did there is specify a selector, in CSS lingo. It's one of the things that make CSS so incredibly useful. The relevant section of the spec is actually quite readable, compared to other parts. Unfortunately, IE only supports CSS1's selector forms (see sections 1.4, 1.5, 1.6 in that spec). Makeshifts last the longest.	[reply]
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]