Chicken-waving?

I've been looking at source code for a lot of web designers' sites, and I
frequently
see:

- DOCTYPE spec
- link to a style sheet
- but still plenty of old-fashioned repetitive formatting embedded in the
page body, which
is laid out with tables

Is there any *good* reason to do this, or is it just ceremonial
chicken-waving?

Mary Ellen
Doctor Science, MA
http://www.livejournal.com/users/mecurtin/

Mary Ellen Curtin wrote:

I've been looking at source code for a lot of web designers' sites, and I
frequently see:

- DOCTYPE spec

Becuase they learned that all HTML documents must have a doctype... even if
they haven't learned about following a DTD.

- link to a style sheet

Because you can't do a:hover with obsolete markup.

- but still plenty of old-fashioned repetitive formatting embedded in the
page body, which is laid out with tables

"It works"

--
David Dorward http://dorward.me.uk/

In article <jft%a.993$2K5.98693191 (AT) news (DOT) netcarrier.net>, one of infinite monkeys
at the keyboard of "Mary Ellen Curtin" <mecurtin (AT) alumniSPAM (DOT) princetonME.eduNOT> wrote:

Is there any *good* reason to do this, or is it just ceremonial
chicken-waving?

<guess class="wild">
Someone told them CSS is the way to do it, but nothing about why.
So it's unmotivated tokenism.
</guess>

Oh, wait a minute: you said web deezyners. That'll be the wannabes in
a back bedroom[1], putting in a stylesheet to tell their
victim^H^Hclients they can do it.

[1] for values of back bedroom that may include smart office where
accompanied by sufficient bullshit^H^Hmarketing skills.

--
Nick Kew

In urgent need of paying work - see http://www.webthing.com/~nick/cv.html

Joel opined:

Any possibility these people aren't stupid or evil, and are simply
easing themselves through the transformation?

I think there's something to that, but not everything. Here's an example:

http://www.need2know.com/

What you see, looking at the style sheet:

http://www.need2know.com/include/style.css

is that they have indeed mostly used CSS for item formatting (e.g. links),
not at all
for positioning. I think it's a combination of "using CSS for things it can
do that other
methods do poorly or not at all" and "not having the time to redo the code
to be consistent."
So they end up with a "layered look", where Best Practices of 2002 are laid
over BP of 2001 which are over BP of 2000. In other words -- cruft, but
cruft that works.

Now *we*, of course, know that by adhering to the One True Path of
validated, standards-
compliant code we'll never, ever have to worry about layered cruft, right?
Right?

*cicadas*

Mary Ellen
Doctor Science, MA
http://www.livejournal.com/users/mecurtin/

Mary Ellen Curtin wrote:

Now *we*, of course, know that by adhering to the One True Path of
validated, standards-compliant code we'll never, ever have to
worry about layered cruft, right?

Nitpick: valid, standard compliant code != non layered cruft.

To achieve that code needs to be *correct*.


Headless

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On Sat, 16 Aug 2003 13:29:36 -0400, "Mary Ellen Curtin"
<mecurtin (AT) alumniSPAM (DOT) princetonME.eduNOT> wrote:

I've been looking at source code for a lot of web designers' sites, and I
frequently see:

- DOCTYPE spec
- link to a style sheet
- but still plenty of old-fashioned repetitive formatting embedded in the
page body, which
is laid out with tables

Is there any *good* reason to do this, or is it just ceremonial
chicken-waving?

Probably a number of reasons, which vary from site to site.

- In some cases because it's too big a job to completely rebuild in one
go a site that was originally done a few years ago, so there is a
transition period.

- In some cases because the number of NN4 visitors is still large enough
to make one stick to those bits of CSS which NN4 supports. (I'm still
getting 3%-4% visitors from NN4-era browsers; I don't fuss too much
about cosmetics for them, as long as the site is readable, but I can
understand that some people might).

- In some cases as a result of the tools in use.

- And doubtless in some (many?) cases because the authors actually don't
understand what they're doing.

--
Stephen Poley

http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/