Forum Moderators: not2easy
The article is a metric pantsload of distortions, half-truths, and self-serving assertions, sprinkled with an occasional out-of-context fact to create the appearance of reasoned opinion. The rationale seems to be that Decloak’s software uses tables for layout and does not support CSS layout except via user gymnastics; hence CSS layout is bad.
Article here... [decloak.com]
Have to say that I agree, they appear to miss the point entirely.
Nick
A quick look at their own site confirms my opinion. Whole chunks of text is presented by images rather than text.
Oh Dear
Seems a lot of people are really UPSET at this article....Well, I guess, if you been brainwashed for the last 2 years or so on the absolute superiority of CSS (e.g. sort of like the Nazis who thought they were the superior race) only to watch it crumbling down with one little web page article, I guess you would be upset as well.
The debate between CSS and table based layout is one that deserves to be heard, but statements like the one above which compares designers and programmers to Nazis are just plain offensive.
only to watch it crumbling down with one little web page article
yep, the css world has been shaken to its core.
is this one of Bretts sub-projects? ;)
*THE REASON FOR CSS PURIST'S HOSTILITY
(A lot of these CSS purists don't even have a data-driven site so they have no appreciation of what you can do with a database. Plus their own personal web site typically has a bunch of static pages anyway. They have no idea that after the 10 minute FLASH commercial that people actually want to do something practical besides being entertained.)
there's nothing like making assumptions is there ;)... apart from the fact that most sites I do are database driven and I actually build databases too.... the majority of Top level CSS'ers have blogs.. last time I looked they were mainly database driven?
Oh and btw.. I just sat through the nested template tour it's every bit as bad as I though it would be, but then I am older than 12!
My guess is that they only just found out about CSS and realised that their templates aren't gonna sell that well, especially seeing as how MX2004 will let even DW coders play with CSS ;)
My "assumptions" are backed by the fact I just did a 4 "level" CSS site template c/w with "multiple context section" menu... and all this works off one stylesheet without the need to learn a whole new product complete with its "helper" functions and excess code
sheesh do you think we should all spend the next year or so learning this product just so we can prove that he is incorrect? or indeed do you think an employer should pay not only for the product but an employee to learn it as well...
I wouldn't even look past the first paragraph of an article like that ususally, let alone see what it's selling, but I needed a laugh this morning ;)
But then again [s]he has maybe got something right... Bad Publicity is still Publicity
Suzy
There is one truth I found among the misspelled words, however:
"...50% of bandwidth is Images anyway. Then there is 25% for the original content, 5% for the JavaScript, 5% for the CSS page, and 5% for all the other HTML like anchor tags, body, head, etc..... In the end, there is not much left to reduce in the first place... "
In many of my pages, this is pretty close to fact. I deal with mostly images with descriptions in tables. It's near impossible to improve the guts of it with CSS - the bandwidth is images. In fact, our product pages FP gives an estimated time to load of 180 seconds at 56K modem speeds. I've totally rebuilt a couple using CSS where ever possible. I found it's the images when I look at total load time and size of the page. The HTML code is a small fraction. Still, using CSS, I've removed SO many <font> and other tags it's silly. I've gotten some really cool effects, too! Like a stationary background image for the body, then another for the main DIV and it looks like a trick.
The pages are cleaner to view in notepad, etc. Even my TABLES are cleaner! I define some table elements in CSS taking it out of the HTML.
Yes, I do make my first page load FAST - about 10 seconds! It's an introduction with FEW images. Most of our customers do hit multiple pages. Well, that means that my external CSS file will help.
ROI? Well, YES! The comany that laid me off (read - downsized) did indeed! They standardized on CSS so that any idiot could change content and it would match the corporate standard, no matter how green they were with web. Their content is database driven, ends up in tables styled by CSS. (My own forums and guestbook rely heavily on CSS. The tables are built with scripts so CSS makes that really simple!)
The company indeed proved that CSS was worth it in real dollars. This company studied things to a fault, at times taking so long to study that the project was no longer worth doing when they were done with the study.
Tables are still necessary - I can't do our pages without them. I've tried and it's just not practical, nor can some of the things I do with them be done otherwise (I'm darned good with tables!) But I have moved a lot of the TEXT out of tables and into DIVS where I have great control, and the bots can get to the text more easily. And isn't that the point?
I think they are off, but even if correct, I'll take that FIVE percent savings! Trust me, at the size of my pages, 5% is a biig deal. 5% of 10 seconds is nothing, but 5% of 180 seconds is a lot of time.
My point is that this person is amaturish at best and is writing when angry, not thinking rationally. One can feel the electricity still in their finger tips in the first few words. (It takes one to know one - I've been there)
Shadows Papa
Oh, and they use stylesheets as seen below, and style in the body tag and about 60 or 70 <br> tags instead of lists and didn't have spell-check turned on.
<link rel="stylesheet" href="../../../DeCloakConsultingSTYLE.css" type="text/css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="../../../Store/StoreSTYLE.css" type="text/css">
Q. What about W3C Standards and all the other stuff?
A. W3C standards are totally useless.
What good are standards when browsers change so fast by adding new features every month?
...50% of bandwidth is Images anyway. Then there is 25% for the original content, 5% for the JavaScript, 5% for the CSS page, and 5% for all the other HTML like anchor tags, body, head, etc..... In the end, there is not much left to reduce in the first place...
But even the 5% to 10% savings per page can be significant. Especially when you multiply that by the number if hits.
Q. TABLES are for TABULAR DATA and not meant for Web Page Layout whereas CSS is more suited for this.
A. Last time I checked, most web sites use a database. And databases are just a bunch of tables in the first place, hence tabular data.
Nick
Q. TABLES are for TABULAR DATA and not meant for Web Page Layout whereas CSS is more suited for this.
A. Last time I checked, most web sites use a database. And databases are just a bunch of tables in the first place, hence tabular data.
ROTFL
Oh well, I hope no one wastes any time disassembling his arguments piece by piece.
I disagree. I would rather see someone with sufficient competence set things right than see a lot of people ridicule the author.
I disagree. I would rather see someone with sufficient competence set things right than see a lot of people ridicule the author.
The trouble with that is it would turn into a he said/she said argument and the article does not deserve a reasoned reply as it was (btw.. it's not there now?) not a reasoned argument in the first place...
..as was mentioned earlier it sounded as if the author was angry, and we know that reason and anger don't mix.
So in this case I have to agree with TGecho... not worth the time.
W3C standards are totally useless.
This must be someone who really knows what he's talking about.
In fact I have to admit that I gave up reading the article as I found it very difficult to understand what the author was actually trying to do apart from expressing anger.
(But I did check the html code and must say that I found it a rather risky business to write an article expressing such strong feelings about CSS and html code while creating code of not particularly high quality.)
Still I would find it useful if someone experienced in CSS wrote a post (or pointed to an article) that actually dealt with those points where there are differing opinions about CSS.
CSS has been around since 1996 precisely to style and (later) to position documents. There isn't anything else that is supposed to do that.
I don't understand the guy's argument that tables are better and quicker than CSS and that anyone who thinks differently is a fascist elitist with an obsession for abstraction.
Does he also think:
<h3> Big words with a margin</h3>
is more appropriate than:
<div style="margin-left:3em; font-size:1.5em;">
Big words with a margin
</div>
The first one does the job, doesn't it? >;->
Q. TABLES are for TABULAR DATA and not meant for Web Page Layout whereas CSS is more suited for this.
A. Last time I checked, most web sites use a database. And databases are just a bunch of tables in the first place, hence tabular data.
Last time I checked, pretty much every website uses magnetic flux reversals on some sort of hard drive technology for storing data.
I infer from that that webpages should be displayed in hexadecimal (or binary for older browsers) as a series of core-dump images of hard drive sectors.
But Zeldman himself is no saint: he's calmed down a bit recently but before xhtml2 draft regularly espoused the forward compatibility argument, that xhtml is more accessible and the idea that validation means a page works in every device, positions that could also be considered wholly or in part "distortions, half-truths, and self-serving assertions". Nobody's perfect ;)
This article does highlight the gap between opposite sides of current web design thinking. On the one side are folks who think pure CSS+XHTML are a bridge too far, and dismiss all the benefits. On the other side are the folks who believe without question what the w3c says, and dismiss any problems. And somewhere in-between are all the rest of us.
I think articles like this can help lead to a more involved discussion of where we are with web standards, and where we're going. His viewpoint should not just be dismissed out of hand, despite the emotive language.
