A List Apart was quite a nice resource back in the day. A lot of better writing about web standards back then is still relevant now. Keeping presentation separa

A List Apart was quite a nice resource back in the day. A lot of better writing about web standards back then is still relevant now. Keeping presentation separate from the structure of the document is a must and seems to be forgotten today. It also helps with you JavaScript if you keep everything nice and separate. I don't particularly like the Asian guru terminology but It was all the rage at the time and everyone thought it was cool for some reason. > When a new medium borrows from an existing one, some of what it borrows makes sense, but much of the borrowing is thoughtless, “ritual,” and often constrains the new medium. Over time, the new medium develops its own conventions, throwing off existing conventions that don’t make sense. This was quite apparent at the time IIRC. A lot of places at the time wanted a web page to almost like a printed page in a magazine and there was even a lot of magazine and newspaper style layout demos that you would find dotted about the web. Many of these designs are quite dated today because the designers were used to designing things for print rather than for web and never assumed that the content would change. So the page looked great until you put some real content in it that was too long and then the nice layout wouldn't work. I also remember Lorem Ipsum was used everywhere because it "flowed like real text". Except it really didn't and you quickly found that it was utter nonsense. Lorem Ipsum would look like it took the space on the page quite nicely and things would look decent on the PSD. Once you put in English or God forbid a RTL language like Arabic it didn't work and everything again looked off and half arsed. > But beneath questions like “how do I make my pages look the same on every platform” and “how can I make my fonts appear identical on the Macintosh and Windows” is an underlying question – “how do I control the user’s browser?” Indeed, the word control turns up with surprising frequency. I remember in the mid 2000s (I only just left University). I thought it was the absolute height of skill to have my website look the same on every browser that was available. Then I encountered a Macintosh and I realised that it was I was trying to do was impossible because Mac OS Snow Leopard had different mechanism for rendering fonts than Windows. It shook me to the core at the time, I think I barely said anything to anyone for 2 days as I didn't really want to accept the fact that what I thought was pinnacle of ability with CSS wasn't actually possible. I find it quite amusing that I was once so absolutely naive.