[geeks] Newspaper Web Sites

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

On Thu, 16 Aug 2007 19:26:31 -0400
Phil Stracchino <phil.stracchino at speakeasy.net> wrote:

> Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> > Unfortunately, one of the reasons newspaper sites do all of this stuff is
> > not their fault: CSS is broken.
> 
> A lot of this really comes down to "Even with CSS, HTML is a markup
> language, not a page description language."

You are stating this as if CSS were part of HTML.  It isn't.

CSS is separate, and it *IS* a page description language.  

It just happens to be a really bad one.

It was originally supposed to allow you to write strict markup, and then give
the display device hints on how to make it readable.

Even SGML and other pure markup systems are usually is tied with a page
description language, or at least they are if you want readable output from
them.

CSS was supposed to have been something you added to a page, and was supposed
to work without any alterations to HTML markup.  In fact, it was supposed to
help you get rid of all those stupid HTML tricks people used like spacers,
tables, and other crappy ideas.

Obviously that hasn't happened unless you keep your usage fairly minimal.

NOTE: obviously CSS does require hints in the markup, but they do not (or
should not anyway) affect the markup.  Personally, I think CSS could be
defined to do its job externally, but it's far too late for that now.

I have fairly good luck as long as I keep things simple.

My main desires for markup are limiting line length to what is readable (I
hate 250 character lines and stupid crap like that), and keeping layout
control out of my HTML.

Even that is a bitch at times.

CSS looks like it was designed by chimpanzees on crack.

> > This is without even considering the crap you have to do so that Microsoft
> > Internet Explorer will work.  It's the most broken WWW browser out there.
> 
> I refuse to jump through hoops to support it.  I find it darkly amusing
> that, with the advent of www.windizupdate.com that lets me use Firefox
> to update Windows, the *ONLY* thing I need IE for is Comcrap's online
> bill pay ... because their crappy site is so badly written it ONLY works
> in IE, and each time I've found a workaround that's enabled me to log in
> *without* using IE, they've removed or disabled it shortly afterwards.

Yep.

I don't generally support IE either, but sometimes it is a requirement.

IE does some of the most stupid things I've ever seen.

One of the most annoying is that for some markup, if you leave a space after
the end tag, it puts that space in the output.

To avoid it, you have to do stupid crap like this:

	<SOMETAG>
		blah blah blah blah
	</SOMETAG><NEWTAG>
		blah blah blah
	</NEWTAG>

If you don't butt the end/start tags together, IE outputs spaces there.

You have to figure Microsoft does this on purpose.  The bug has been in IE
for years, and I refuse to believe it is that hard to fix.

> Unfortunately, for now, I'm stuck with comcrap for TV service, or I'd
> just tell'em where they could shove it.

Hopefully things will change.

I have noticed quite a few sites simplifying their CSS and other stuff to
make it work better with all browsers.

Unfortunately, quite a few put their programmers through tremendous pain
making stupid ideas work anyway. 


-- 
shannon / Asus A8N5X - Opteron 170 at 2.5GHz | But you know, a little Sun Ultra 1
-------'  2GB RAM - nVidia 7900GS         | is doing all the hard work...