On Wed, 24 May 2006 15:15:31 +0100, Stewart Gordon <sm*******@yaho o.com>
wrote:
What next? People coding up a whole website using no element other than
DIV, and maybe SPAN as well?
That's been here for a while now, haven't you noticed? :)
It amazes me how in such a short space of time we've gone from tag soup
loving CSS bashers to morons who have missed the whole point of CSS and
think tables are banned and that we now use DIVs and SPANs instead of
paragraphs and lists etc. Or worse still are the sites where they still
use table layouts but every cell contains a DIV wrapped around its
contents, or even DIVs around each paragraph, list or other block level
element. And that's before you consider too many class names being used,
most of which have names like "BlueLeftBa r" or "SmallWhiteText " etc.
And it's going to get *much* worse because peoples' fixation with CSS and
purging themselves of tables hasn't got into full swing yet. Funny thing
is, many of the sites that use DIVs everywhere also loyally promote
Firefox. There's a standards bandwagon people have jumped on without
really knowing or caring what those standards mean. It started years ago
with doctypes, then using XHTML markup on pages served as HTML and now
they've all gone CSS crazy. I fear that in a couple of years time things
like incompatible DOMs, quirky CSS implementations , abusing tags for
layout (such as table layouts or blockquotes to indent text) or using
<font color="red" face="times" style="color:#f f0000;font-family:times"> so
that "browsers with and without CSS will display the page the same" will
seem trivial compared to the CSS soup that's out there and the problems
that brings.
But I think part of the blame has to go to messageboards and newsgroups
where people who do know tell those who don't that "You shouldn't use
tables and font tags. Use DIVs and SPANs instead" without spelling it out
to them that they're referring to layout and presentational effects. But
by the same token too many people have never been bothered to read the
specs or even a tutorial properly. They just skim-read a coupld of
paragraphs and messageboard posts and assume what is meant instead of
reading what is said.
