thesheep - 5:22 pm on Nov 22, 2006 (gmt 0)

Chip - what you are saying is that as coders we should be able to take any design thrown at us and code it up - if not then our own coding skills are not up to scratch.

I think there is merit in what you say, in the sense that taking on a challenge can stretch us and often solutions can be found to a problem that seems impossible at first.

However, I think there are some design structures that really are better avoided.

Take, for example, the following type of layout:

An overall 3 column layout. Within this there is a central flexi-width column that contains a further 3 vertical columns with borders and background images that overlap between columns. The columns must be flexible width and always be in exactly the same 33% ratio. The text must be resizable and the layout must not break within 2 increases of text size. The columns must allow for different amounts of textual content but must always be the same height as each other.

Having tried to build things like this, I find that the results are never perfect and the result is a lot of non-semantic markup and CSS hacks. It can also take a very long time to produce and debug.

It may be that my coding skills are not up to scratch (and I freely admit that there are more experienced and knowledgeable CSS coders than myself, quite a few using these forums). But looking around, I don't see these kinds of layout on the web today.

Aside from this, for me the real beauty of web design is to work with the constraints of the media (in this case XHTML/CSS) and produce pages that have both visual appeal and are as robust, well-structured and maintainable as possible.