opencomponentry

My new friend Kirill has reminded me of another constant source of vomiting when he made some observations about my anti-Swing web development rant.

Specifically he mentions CSS as being somehow better at laying out html than umm…html?

A possible analogy for the web development would be doing everything in pure HTML (and its deficiencies with using tables for everything) instead of using much more flexible CSS layouts.

This post isn’t really about what he said as I think he seems like a pretty smart guy and can probably wipe the floor with me in many programming areas - but more about this weird trend in web development where people defend a lack of control over HTML by pointing to how people should be using better layout techniques - like CSS - instead.

Or the other myth that people like to spread about how using tables is evil. I know I’ve heard them say these things in forums / blog posts / issues reported by their users - the condescending jerks.

Why do you need control over the html? You have CSS - it’s the only way web development should be done. geez n00b

You know what? I call bullshit. I hate to break the news to you guys, but out of all the content you can possibly control in a browser the HTML part is probably the most important one. Yeah, the jig is up guys. You actually do need to be able to control some of that HTML when writing web applications if you want to actually use all that the web has to offer.

Oh I know….I’ve read the alistapart.com articles too. I know all about tableless layouts. I’ve spent hours / days / lost hair trying to make countless layout configurations work strictly that way. It’s ok, you’re not the only ones who believe(ed) it. That’s all fine and well, but until all browsers everywhere implement the very latest CSS standards correctly and fully - the rest of us here in the real world trying to write real applications have to deal with what we’ve been given.

Sometimes a table is kind of nice. Sometimes you can do all kinds of neat shit in tables that you probably don’t even know how to do in CSS even if it is possible. Have you seen these clowns at ebay and google? They’ve got those ugly ass tables littered all over their sites.

Haha - jokes on them. Oh wait - don’t they employ some of the best interface developers the industry has to offer? Damn….Well maybe that’s just old code that no one has bothered to clean up yet. I’m sure <your Swing-like steaming java turd web development API here> will fix all of that up as soon as they start using it.

So whatever, you can paint by numbers if you want to…Or you can use the most that your browser has to offer you. Your choice.