CSS (Cascading Style Shits) Purists
There was a time when “programming” HTML was the job of a child: create a table, add some lorem ipsum, some images with vertical alignment tweaked a little, and (god forbid) an iframe or frame set. Javascript was cryptic and served the purpose of altering the status bar of your browsers and generally just be annoying.
Along came CSS… Now everyone in their right mind would greet CSS with flowers and as a liberator. Freeing us from the work of creating layouts and individual styling of each element that you want to look the same across many pages. Another great benefit of it is that you can swap style sheets in 1 go and have a completely different looking layout (even modifying some content at times)!
The unfortunate side-effect of this was CSS purists. If you have never met anyone like this, let me explain. These are the people who swear that you can construct a portable, solid layout without any table elements in your code. Everything is <li> or <div> or <span> in the entire website. “Tables”, they say, “are for displaying tabular data, nothing more.”
Yes, people still use it.
How they justify spending hours of their day performing hacks/kludges/work-arounds on their code is beyond me. You see, the CSS standard is merely a set of suggestions that different browsers choose to implement or not. Some add rules that don’t exist in the standard. Basically, to make something look the same in all browsers is a work of magic.
I’m sure this isn’t a popular view, but I’ll be damned if I am not allowed to use a table for a layout that’s supposed to have columns. In a single element, I can achieve (cross-browser and without testing, mind you), the same thing that a CSS purist would have to test over and over again and get different results depending on the resolution of the monitor, font-size set by the browser’s user, browser type, version, and operating system.
I believe CSS has it’s place in web-development, don’t get me wrong. It’s the CSS-evangelists that I have a problem with. Not only do they waste my time when forcing their views upon me, but the smug attitude that comes along with it is akin to using a Mac Book Pro at a Starbucks to work on a novel that will never be perfected enough to be published.
Maybe when CSS3 and HTML5 are fully supported I’ll change my mind. Until then, suck on my <table>!
In the interest of informing, here’s a few CSS Magic websites:
A review site with a slightly negative bent. In other words, we love to hate.