In Part XVIIII of Afternoon Attacks the Web Community with a Cudgel, I pick on designer and writer Curt Cloninger. Curt is the author of the excellent Fresh Styles for Web Designers, the only book on web design I own.

I explained my crusade, albeit not very well, and he had some interesting points to make, not least this:

So why, if I’m doing a design-centric, low-text site, do I care about being standards compliant? The standards aren’t made to accomodate the kind of work I’m doing anyway, and they never will be.

I just think of standards as the walls of the room I’m in, whereas of course it’s actually the browser implementations of those standards that make up the walls. I disagree though, standards are important to every developer because the web is young and imperfect medium and it’s the standards that are going to push it forwards. That’s why I’m concerned in many ways, because I see the web being pushed forward with semantic purity, accessibility and usability the only goals, engendering a rather dull, almost Victorian, experience totally in contrast to our “everybody’s having sex right now but you!” OTT culture.

One thing I noticed is that Curt mentioned the whole Tim Berners-Lee High Energy Physics thing. Everybody, no matter which team their on, mentions this. Strange. I have been thinking anyway that my idea to start the ALA article out with a bit of history is probably redundant since everybody knows it already. I’m getting less sure about my article day by day. What am I actually saying?

• CSS really great, mainly
• Tables bad, complicated, old, semantically useless
• Web design hard, medium has little control, people (esp. clients) demand faithful reproduction
• Fluidity is one of the keys to success, allows people to do cool things like bump their text sizes or turn off images or resize their browser to 1 pixel square whilst retaining perfect layout
• Overall, tables better at fluidity than CSS
• But tables bad

• Need new thing!

  • Is fluid
  • Predictable
  • Easy to use, painless for as many layouts as possible
  • Good for both coders and DW-monkeys
  • Complimentary to and logically consistent with rest of CSS
  • Similar to tables for reasons of application and implementation
  • Contains advanced syntax for specifying how the layout adapts to different devices or browsers
  • Allows author to specify ways for things to change
  • Allows author to know the frame of reference so they can always do something cool with it

Curt also pointed me in the direction of the Dao of Web Design, a really good ALA article about living on the web, building pages that are flexible and that work for people. I don’t think I’ve been making this clear when I’ve been hassling people, I certainly didn’t make it clear when I wrote to Curt, but this is the big thing for me. Pages have to fit the end browser, in terms of size, font, everything, that’s got to be the way it is and that’s where CSS is lacking IMHO. Grids aren’t great for this, which is why they should be able to reconfigure intelligently. Though working out a syntax to express all this is probably an NP-complete problem. The more I think about this, the more I think I should have been doing this five years ago, when I said I would do something similar for my degree final project and then smoked a bunch of weed instead. This is the kind of thing that would be a cool PhD.