Regards,
Kevin.
On 3/9/06, Paul Novitski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
At 08:23 PM 3/8/2006, Ben Buchanan wrote:
>That's pretty much the rub of it all, for me! :) If only Microsoft had
>created a proprietary comment system for CSS, at least it would have
>been useful without so many downsides.
That so typifies Microsoft's schizophrenia. They're such a large
organization, they must have hundreds if not thousands of creative
directions happening simultaneously: hordes of brilliant geeks,
impossible to wrangle. It's such a shame that they weren't on the
web standards page early enough to foresee the importance of
separating presentation from content from logic. Convert the latest
Word or Excel document to HTML and you'll see the worst practices rampant.
Earlier this century I scrambled from the leaky rowboat of ASP onto
the running board of the steam locomotive of ASP.Net, then
immediately realized I was only penetrating farther into the murky
tunnel of death. The .Net technology seemed to merge logic with
markup and style even more densely than before, keyed particularly to
IE's quirks, making it more difficult, not easier, to achieve decent
web standards with Microsoft's proprietary technology. Who knows,
perhaps I was short-sighted and those who have plunged deeply into
.Net have found ways to separate them cleanly, but I don't for a
moment regret my decision to leap from the sinking Microsoft tanker
to the skimming PHP skiff. PHP doesn't require clean separation but
it sure as hell helps us achieve it.
I wonder how our work would be different today if the designers of
CSS had foreseen the chaos that's resulted from our trying to get
styles to work cross-browser. Would they have built
browser-version-conditional branching into CSS? I doubt
it. Browser-sniffers are only as dependable as the browsers'
willingness not to spoof, which is to say not much. And we'd still
be hacking our way around browsers written early enough not to know
how to respond to the conditional branching. Back to square one.
It's unnerving to realize that the crazy-quilt world we live in may
actually be the best of all probable worlds.
Paul
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