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Well it worked. Kind of. What a lot of developers need to understand is that HTML shouldn't be use for layout. HTML should be use for semantic and information

by remify 8y ago

Well it worked. Kind of. What a lot of developers need to understand is that HTML shouldn't be use for layout. HTML should be use for semantic and information structure.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
> What a lot of developers need to understand is that HTML shouldn't be use for layout. HTML should be use for semantic and information structure. That was the great lie of the 2000s. It was oft repeated, but almost never adhered to. CSS Zen Garden was cool, but the typical attempt at "separating content from presentation" almost universally resulted in a div soup that was even worse than table layouts. If a div exists only to hang a class off it, so that it can be targeted in CSS, it's a part of layout, not semantic/information structure. In a perfect world, in which most websites were not actively user-hostile, we could have separation of layout from content. It would include relinquishing control over rendering back to the users. It would require to stop obsessing so much over colors and layouts and custom controls. The very concept is anathema to the modern web, though.
- dmix 8y ago
  > If a div exists only to hang a class off it, so that it can be targeted in CSS, it's a part of layout, not semantic/information structure. Thanks, I've always thought this intuitively but never seen it written out. Just as any academic theory hitting the reality through actual implementation, the theory should be more of a guiding force instead of a rigid structure to follow. Much like how the military learned to plan battles (No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy - Helmuth von Moltke the Elder) by giving troops higher-level objectives, rather than planning every single step of the attack, such as exactly where they should walk and hide, and expecting them to follow it to a T. This is how I approach most programming/web design theories... including BEM.
- Domenic_S 8y ago
  > div soup At my last job we called it "divarrhea"
chii 8y ago
So then what is used for layout? Don't say CSS, because CSS depends (somewhat) on the html.
Frondo 8y ago
The problem is that, yes, this is the ideal, but when the ideal ran up against the real world usage of these tools, two things happened, one inevitable and the other just a bad choice: 1) a small, extremely vocal group of devs kept reminding us this while the rest of us used the standards "wrong" and did fancy layouts and things, 2) seeing how most of the world used the tools we had, the standards folks didn't give us good layout tools or application development tools, they gave us CSS and it took browser vendors like Microsoft to give us XHR. Oh what I'd give for the standards folks to have taken some time to look at the world being built around them, and then given us a better way to do that, instead of "HTML shouldn't be used for layout" for years. I feel like, had things gone in a different direction, web development now would be as easy as VB/Delphi/Lazarus (hell, even tcl/tk) once made desktop app development. Instead, we get the soup of languages, build tools, and the confusing mess of modern web dev. Sigh.

by remify 8y ago

Well it worked. Kind of. What a lot of developers need to understand is that HTML shouldn't be use for layout. HTML should be use for semantic and information structure.

TeMPOraL 8y ago

> What a lot of developers need to understand is that HTML shouldn't be use for layout. HTML should be use for semantic and information structure. That was the great lie of the 2000s. It was oft repeated, but almost never adhered to. CSS Zen Garden was cool, but the typical attempt at "separating content from presentation" almost universally resulted in a div soup that was even worse than table layouts. If a div exists only to hang a class off it, so that it can be targeted in CSS, it's a part of layout, not semantic/information structure. In a perfect world, in which most websites were not actively user-hostile, we could have separation of layout from content. It would include relinquishing control over rendering back to the users. It would require to stop obsessing so much over colors and layouts and custom controls. The very concept is anathema to the modern web, though.

dmix 8y ago
> If a div exists only to hang a class off it, so that it can be targeted in CSS, it's a part of layout, not semantic/information structure. Thanks, I've always thought this intuitively but never seen it written out. Just as any academic theory hitting the reality through actual implementation, the theory should be more of a guiding force instead of a rigid structure to follow. Much like how the military learned to plan battles (No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy - Helmuth von Moltke the Elder) by giving troops higher-level objectives, rather than planning every single step of the attack, such as exactly where they should walk and hide, and expecting them to follow it to a T. This is how I approach most programming/web design theories... including BEM.
Domenic_S 8y ago
> div soup At my last job we called it "divarrhea"

chii 8y ago

So then what is used for layout? Don't say CSS, because CSS depends (somewhat) on the html.

Frondo 8y ago

The problem is that, yes, this is the ideal, but when the ideal ran up against the real world usage of these tools, two things happened, one inevitable and the other just a bad choice: 1) a small, extremely vocal group of devs kept reminding us this while the rest of us used the standards "wrong" and did fancy layouts and things, 2) seeing how most of the world used the tools we had, the standards folks didn't give us good layout tools or application development tools, they gave us CSS and it took browser vendors like Microsoft to give us XHR. Oh what I'd give for the standards folks to have taken some time to look at the world being built around them, and then given us a better way to do that, instead of "HTML shouldn't be used for layout" for years. I feel like, had things gone in a different direction, web development now would be as easy as VB/Delphi/Lazarus (hell, even tcl/tk) once made desktop app development. Instead, we get the soup of languages, build tools, and the confusing mess of modern web dev. Sigh.