I am deeply impressed with Ron Garret‘s article on CSS, Why CSS should not be used for layout. He hits the nail squarely on the head. As the article explains in much greater depth than I’m about to, there is a fundamental design error in CSS, which forces you write awkward unintuitive CSS code in order to create simple page layouts.

Ron’s recommendation, with which I concur, is to use tables to do things that tables do better than the usual CSS constructs – such as define areas of a page. Garret makes the important point that CSS was supposed to separate design from content and it has failed. I’m with you on this entirely, Ron.

How The IT Industry Screws Up

The IT industry does a lot of things well, but what it does best is to screw up. Every new wave of technology is accompanied by a series of fan boys of varying intelligence all of whom seem inclined to sweep away everything that went before. The new wave always seems to behave like the Russian Bolsheviks producing obtuse and fundamentally dishonest arguments to criticize their opponents – ultimately reducing meaningful debate to meaningless slogans.

This was satirized mercilessly in Animal Farm with the chant “four legs good, two legs bad” and Napoleon the pig mollifying the chickens by telling them that wings count as legs. So the Unix generation screwed over the mainframe generation (but forgot completely to include a real file system.) And the PC generation (led by Microsoft) had complete amnesia about multiuser computing, and then claimed they were inventing something new when they were forced to reinvent the wheel.

So the technologies of the web seem to have forgotten everything that we learned about the separation of concerns and visual programming. Consequently web sites are built with PHP mixed with HTML and CSS. Three goddam languages where once there was one, with content inextricably linked with code and mark-up. Right now I’m looking at a product called WaveMaker, which attempts to fix this problem to some degree. I’ll let you know if it looks like it does.