There are times I've been somewhat of a curmudgeon when it comes to web standards but that doesn't mean I don't see the practicality and almost necessity of using them to develop websites. Every one I know who's in the web business has done their best to add XHTML/CSS to their skill sets and use these techniques to create new sites while adapting legacy projects.
In my experience, neither age or prior knowledge seems to be a huge factor in learning style sheets, anyone can do it. I've seen employees new to web development altogether breeze through web standards while experienced developers use the hunt-and-peek method in their brain while trying to imagine a world without tables (I have been and continue to be a member of the later group). In either case the methods are sound and the results live up to all the hype coming from web standards evangelism.
In short, web standards are good.
But it would seem that the message of code salvation has not reached the hearts of every web developer. In fact this treatise against web standards (discovered through The Return of Design) has been written in with such fervor that it seems more appropriate material for a rally at Nuremberg, not a messily software company website.
Here are some of my favorite quotes from Decloak's very informative tract on the evils of Cascading Style Sheets and the dangerous of CSS zealots who sacrifice goats to DIV tags at every sacred W3C gathering.
To make this even more fun, do your best to impersonate Republican National Convention Zell Miller while reading.
"...if it's one thing that full CSS isn't, it's simple as there is a considerable learning curve. And by the way, there is the actual implementation of full CSS, which is also complex. And full CSS has tons and tons of hacks and so-called work around just to get it to work right even in the latest browsers IE 6 and Netscape 7. And that's not even mentioning the Mac browser versions."
"Microsoft has a hard enough time trying to get their software to work and out the door, do you honestly think they are going to sit around waiting for the W3C committee to make up their minds on the next standard or regularly consult with any Mozilla programmers to make sure their's browser works with IE?"
"Microsoft will NEVER make their browser 100% W3C compliant as they always keep adding new features. In fact, all Microsoft's products are not 100% standards compliant because they will always have something to add to the latest product."
"CSS purists can kiss Apple's Safari browser goodbye to your list of compatible browsers as long as Steve Jobs is CEO of Apple. And you definitely can say "hasta la vista" to IE 7 as long as Mr. Bill and Mr. Ballmer are running the show."
"Futhermore, if your website get bigger, how are you going to remember precisely that this CSS style belongs to these set of pages but not those set of pages? Pretty soon you got this huge CSS style sheet that has these short semi-vague names describing every single thing in your entire website of which you have try to figure out which style means what and to which pages it will be applied to."
"Furthermore, CSS zealots have been predicting the future of CSS since the year 2000. And guess what, it's now 2004 and we are not a single step closer to CSS browser compliance than we were in 2000 with even the latest browsers Mozilla 1.x and IE 6. So after 4 or more years of preaching that CSS is the future, the future never gets here and it never will."
"And what about 2 months from now? Are you really going to remember which style that these pages are applied to? That 2-second change is now 2 hours re-familiarizing yourself which style belongs to which pages. Plus, you have to make sure that this style didn't change some other page you didn't want to."
Come to think of it, this sounds more like the hateful chatter of the Taliban to me — sorry Senator Miller, my bad. Make sure you don't miss the pie chart used to disprove the myths of web standards superiority over techniques used by ancient cave dwellers in 1997.
Join the fray by reading through and commenting at the end.
It's interesting that he characterizes the W3C as simultaneously being too slow to incorporate new features, and too fast for browser writers to keep up.
Although all of them are pretty bad, the Safari quote perhaps shows the most idiocy of all. Clearly Safari has been right there with Mozilla every step of the way in implementing standards, and one could even argue that Dave Hyatt and the Safari tema are more committed to standards than the Firefox group. In any case, Safari is so obviously a forward-thinking and standards-oriented project that it's just totally absurd to make such an assertion.
In follow up, I just read his reasoning for the Safari quote:
"It's also the same for Apple's browser, Safari. Steve Jobs understands business. Do you see parts of their Apple computer being made by a 3rd party company like you do with the PC computer. No!"
Not only does this guy not seem to know that the PowerPC processor is built by Moto and IBM and the video cards Apple uses are made by ATI and nVidia, he apparently flat missed the whole Intel/Apple deal.
"Clueless" pretty much said it all.
Here here!! I too couldn't go past linking to this one myself.. maybe they're after the viral advertising effect. Flame war brings traffic then they recant..
"I specifically awarded them the saddest, lamest, dumb arsed, most hick, hillbilly, yehaw, troglodyte award for flat earth mentality and denial of the year. Sir [I stated], wear your badge with honour because we too have the good nature to not shoot at idjuts."
Occasionally I run into these kind of guys in forums and so forth though so I'm fully aware they exist - like the Klan and many other small minded groups. There's just some that will never get it or want to evolve in any way. Maybe IT isn't the career for them after all.
I like the fact that he advocates using application-specific templates in order to gain the same performance benefits as using CSS, which works regardless of whether you choose to develop using Notepad or Dreamweaver.
Wow, I didn't think somebody could still be so ignorant towards standards? Someone should buy him a clue cause this guy needs one.
And I wanted to write:weird sense of humor; but amused instead. :D
The whole article reminded me of something I read somewhere recently about why we should keep people with AIDS quarantined. It's just so far from the mark it makes me want to CRY.
Well, while I disagree with most of his points, I think he's pretty right about the "2 months from now" thing.
Visually, it was far more pratical to tweak tables, font tags, inline colours expecially because you could find/see them inside the actual page.
On the other hand, if you're working on large sites with hundereds of pages, style sheets may give you headache at the beginning but on the long run nothing beats the convenience of modifing a single file to change the appearence of other hunderds. I still have nightmares for those terrible sessions of "extended find and replace" in 1999. :)
Maybe this is just a publicity stunt to get attention for the products he sells. Too bad, he seems to succeed....
Decloak has been banging this drum for some time now. I had the "pleasure" of aguing the point for standards against him in a techrepublic.com forum in 2003.
I think he was wrong then and I still do - each to their own. Look at it as the last rallying cry for a bygone age :-)
While I agree with what everyone is saying, there's also the likelihood that decloak is merely a very successful troll. I'm afraid all this attention is just feeding his hunger by springing his trap. How many unecessary hits will he get because of one lousily researched and innacurate article? Probably not many. How many now? Probably too many.
I think he should define exactly what he means with "considerable learning curve".
I don't know if it's just me but I tought myself the basics of CSS in an afternoon, and after playing around with it for a couple of days I've never used a table again.
Maybe he didn't have a chance to complete his sentence and meant to say: "...if it's one thing that full CSS isn't, it's simple as there is a considerable learning curve if you want to learn CSS while you're on acid."
"Microsoft will NEVER make their browser 100% W3C compliant as they always keep adding new features."
Huh? How do they manage to do this when they haven't released a new browser in four years?
I agree with Brian; this sounds like a guy using the "there is no such thing as bad publicity" tactic.
I mean, is anyone really listening to this assclown? If he wants to continue to advocate producing ugly websites using old technology (using his own as an example), it's a free country. I'd be hard-pressed to find any credible person who agrees with him.
I recently addressed this topic by pointing out that NONE of the four leading Web companies (Google, eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo) code to standards: Why Don’t the Big 4 Switch to Web Standards?
So, given the "goodness" of web standards, why don't the most successful web-centric companies use them? And, going further, what does that mean for the rest of us?
"So after 4 or more years of preaching that CSS is the future, the future never gets here and it never will."?
Like anyone can even know that...
Is Joshua correct? Can it be that, of all people, Google and Yahoo are not using uptodate web standards?.
There was a learning curve for design sites with tables, too.
I posted this elsewhere, but I would like to add it here:
I suppose if you started off designing sites using tables, you might be resistant to change. However, CSS is the future and a lack of adaptablity is a death sentence in high tech.
I am not a web professional (or CSS advocate/Nazi) by any means, just an amateur goof-off, and I learned designing sites with tables and CSS at the same time (a short span of time, too). I did not find CSS all that easy to learn, but tables were certainly no easier. But as someone who works as a technical writer and uses styles everyday in Word, it has always been obvious to be that centralizing your formatting in one place makes a lot more sense in the long run, even if the learning curve is steep.
The google/yahoo question is a good one. I would suspect that editing the google homepage is not as easy as some random guy opening it in notepad...
Standards are obviously on the rise, from what we have seen all over the interweb. Give it some time.
It has taken this long for momentum to change. Companies don't change their website strategies overnight.
Why Don’t the Big 4 Switch to Web Standards?
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becuase they have a business to run and have to make it work on as many browsers as possible. Some people still us IE4 and if you use CSS and @import then they lose business.
as for the assclown who wrote the CSS vs Tables thing he is so retarded it's sad. This is why it's hard to find jobs as a web designer when people still use Dreamweaver's design view and you use CSS and they have no idea what it is.
"You essentially make it harder to figure out where things go in Macromedia’s Dreamweaver design view."... nuff said
And the thing about load things is so dumb. If there file size is smaller it loads faster... it really is that simple.
I have the feeling this is not the first time the Decloak guys make the rounds through the "blogosphere". I was checking some files of 2003 recently and they were mentioning them, on a very similar theme. It all comes down to this: They sell website templates for Dreamweaver and other platforms that, you guessed it, are absolutely non-kosher in regards to web standards, so they get busy screaming "Don't believe the (CSS) hype!" to their would-be customers.
I will cut them some slack though - Anyone that has tackled a serious, complex site project trying to embrace web standards knows how ugly and tedious it can get in the long run, specially when trying to make it look okay on every browser of the planet (specially that one with the blue "E" icon). I can think of funnier things to do with my time than that. Add to that the whole W3C validation and Bobby issues demanded by accesibility nazis, and you can see why not all big companies are willing to take the full plunge on web standards. Dip their toes, maybe, but not a deep plunge.
I wouldn't get back to font tags, though.
Decloak should devote his energy to marketing charcoal lighter fluid; every time I see a reference to his site the flames jump up. Like most here, I disagree with some of his arguments:
The re-design nightmares he points out are not that big a deal. If you want to keep your style sheets straight, keep page-specific styles in separate sheets and add comments with applicable the file names. Simple.
I also disagree with his views on organization. He seems to be confusing an organized page to the visitor's eyes with organized and semantic code. How could it not be easier to find code chunks when you eliminate half or more of the tags?
If anyone's looking for a good contest that would get tons of traffic, this may be it: Mr. Decloak vs. a CSS designer. Redesign 3 pages of a big commercial name site to conform to a pre-determined mockup (home/ product/content, shopping cart), with a follow-up in 6 months to do another re-design and see which wins on page-load speed, bandwith, speed of production, and speed of re-design. They're measurable results, and graphics could be shared (like in Veer's Lighboxing) to eliminate any advantage on the content creation/design side of the equation.
He'd smack down an amateur like me with my own rolled-up copy of DWWS, but how about some of our popular standards advocates, or some of his harsher critics from this comment list? 9Rules and Airbag have already seen their share of contest controversy in the past, so why not on this topic?
Flaming and arguing aside, the man is entitled to his opinion (albeit a bad one). If he wants to continue making sites using table tags and the likes - so be it. Personally, I learned CSS over a period of time (toyed with it over a few months) and when I realized what it could really do and how I could take a page and rearrange however I wanted - I too never used another table tag. If I DO use a table tag, it's for what a table was designed to display, tabular data.
I guess my main concern is why would you want to sift through table, tr, and td tags when you could just enclose what you wanted in that td tag in a div tag and style away? It's just easier on the eyes and suits templating much better than the table layout method.
My two cents...
Did somebody say flame bait? They must be getting 100,000 hits an hour at this rate. They have a link on almost every web standard advocate's site/blog.
"In my experience, neither age or prior knowledge seems to be a huge factor in learning style sheets, anyone can do it."
True words! My wife wanted to make a website for her dining reviews, and in the space of an hour I walked her through the process of making a CSS website layout. Now she modifies and maintains her site just fine, using nothing but a text editor.
I think both camps are valid. Our goal as web developers is not to follow standards, but to make the web site reach as many people as possible. Since reaching everyone is impossible, we have to choose our target audience.
When people look at a website, they notice the following: speed, design, readability, and usefulness. How it's built (HTML, css, binary, whatever) is of little concern to non-technical people.
I don't stop visiting sites because they use table layouts.
Again, moderation with all things generally makes the most sense. Ideally, the more designers and programmers buy into the web standards model, the more pressue will exist for browsers to comply with those standards. Ideally, I only code for Mozilla and IE 6, and ignore all others - why? Because time is money, and honestly testing CSS for every possible browser scenario is worthless when 99% of my target audience is Wintel/Mozilla or IE. And this is especially true for corporate clients, where the vast majority of enterprises have standardized on IE.
hah. I read that as well and chuckled a little as well. I should have read it through as Zell Miller, though. For the past year I've been steadily learning the ways of validation and css (though I haven't touched XHTML yet) to get 'up to speed' with the rest of the web. Yeah, it's a pain, but hey, I'm glad I've done it. Both tables and css have their pros and their cons. I went through my tables-only phase, now i'm going through my forced css-only phase and once i've got css down as good as i have tables, i'll start to mix the two.
As for their claims to IE-- IE is quickly losing an audience as people (even stubborn IE diehards like i was) switch to Mozilla due to its standards compliancy and its buffed up virus protection. Microsoft should get with the program if it wants to stay on top. Over the last year it seems there has been more thrust for a more standards-compliant web than ever, and that was largely why I started down this trail of 'reteaching.'
Only time will tell though, I suppose.
I'm just a simple caveman print designer plodding up the CSS learning curve and as such have nothing to contribute to that part of the debate. But sheesh. Nuremberg? Taliban? Really?
The guy is a moron. I take that back, maybe he is a great marketing genious. I agree that the write he did was for marketing and he knew he would get thousands of visits from the article. Granted, you want 'targeted visitors', not just a visit and most of his visits are from standards advocates :) so maybe my point is moot.
Anyways, he brought up the point of coming back to a site years later to work on it. I don't care if its in CSS or tables, if you are coming to a site a couple years later, its going to be hard as hell to figure out what goes where.
Hell, just add comments to your stylesheet, and that will fix the problem of not knowing where stuff is.
PLUS, its MUCH easier to run a dynamic site where all you have is a HEADER and a FOOTER include, then your actual individual pages are simply the content that goes on them. That way you only have to trudge through 1 page of the HTML, HEAD, BODY stuff instead of every page. If you are doing it in dreamweaver like this guy, its probably a template meaning 5 pages are all straight HTML or he is using a 'template'.
Now, I personally use Dreamweaver, but I spend my time in codeview about 99% of it.
"In short, web standards are good."
so right. but as long as MS IE is out of it, regular uses won't know or notice or,, well wouldn't bother what's going on especially 95% of the users in one's country are using IE...
very sad. yeah,, u can try to tell that to my koreans. T-T
well,, i'm not giving up tho. . .
Well I do know one thing to be true, I work at a place taht uses MAC's and they are running on OS9 and alot of sites I go to which are built using CSS tableless designs they either don't show, or they don't show in the correct way. I am definetly not agree with the guy, and I am definetly not against CSS, and the fact taht the "web standards" should be taking over the web to make it a much nicer, and more well designed world. Just a thought as to when the world and their oporating systems will be ready for "The take over"
Who cares if Declaok is getting tens of thousands of hits because of all the negative press? The hits aren't coming from anyone who is likely to become a client of theirs. As Bryan said (three comments above), "you want 'targeted visitors', not just a visit and most of his visits are from standards advocates" .