« Mobile Phones Provided Immediate Coverage of 7-7| Main | V-22 Osprey: Cool, Fast, and Expensive »
WTF? How About Style Sheets?
So I'm taking a look at upgrading the web site. I've kicked around HTML ever since there was an HTML, so I think I know the deal. This time, for the first time on my own site, I think I'm going to use style sheets extensively. (For those of you who don't know, style sheets are a way of having a "master" layout. You update the style sheet, and it can change your whole site without having to edit each page)
The problem is, style sheets are a piece of junk.
Playing around last night, it seems that every browser has its own way of implementing style sheets. You would think that, being a standard, it would work the same way everywhere. (Isn't that the meaning of the word 'standard'?)
It's so bad that there are books on Amazon.com for style sheet hacks.
Looking at this from the outside, and I'm a programmer, not a graphic artist, it looks like the architecture of the major browsers is getting in the way of the implementation of the standard. That's not a place you want to be, no matter who you are.
In particular, my advice to Microsoft is to rewrite IE. I'm not talking about making a big new feature list and kludging on new code into the old: I'm saying start from zero and rewrite the whole thing. It probably wouldn't be nearly as much as keeping the old product around and it would breathe life into all of the Microsoft product offerings.
I could get into a feature list easily: tabbed browsing, full standards compliance, completely managed code, etc. But the decision-making authority for this isn't us, it's Microsoft's.
CSS isn't a standard. It's an open specification. Ignore the idiots who prattle on about "web standards", pretty much all of them aren't.
HTML isn't a standard. XML isn't a standard. XHTML isn't a standard. CSS isn't a standard. Javascript isn't a standard. The DOM isn't a standard.
ISO-HTML, which is similar to HTML 4.01 is a standard. SGML, which HTML and XML are based upon, is a standard. ECMA-262, which is the formalised syntax of Javascript and JScript, is a standard. JPEG is a standard.
The W3C is not a standards body. It is a vendor consortium that publishes open specifications. Tim Berners Lee intentionally created the W3C in this way because he didn't want to create a standards organisation.
The architecture of the browsers isn't getting in the way of implementing CSS - for the most part, all the major browsers are 99% compliant with CSS 2.1 and have been for years.
Of course, the retard in the room is Internet Explorer, so when people say "design with CSS", what they actually mean is "design with the subset of CSS that Internet Explorer understands".
It leads to many misconceptions - that CSS is inconsistent and difficult - that are not true. CSS is pretty consistent and easy. It's just that the most useful bits - the CSS 2 selectors and display: table-cell, for example - aren't implemented in Internet Explorer, so you can't use them for most websites.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is that it's Internet Explorer that sucks, not CSS itself. Sure, CSS has shortcomings like any specification, but they are insignificant compared with the outright broken behaviour of Internet Explorer.
If you read the Internet Explorer developers' blog ( http://blogs.msdn.com/ie ), then you'll see that their number one priority is compatibility with previous fuckups. Basically, it's "we did it wrong in the past, people have written code that relies on us doing the wrong thing, and now we can't fix it because it will break the fuckups that rely on our fuckups".
So don't expect much to change when Internet Explorer 7.0 comes out.