3 ms·

In theory, it offers better separation of content from presentation. For example, a news article that renders in one column on-screen and two columns printed.

by dpifke 18y ago

In theory, it offers better separation of content from presentation. For example, a news article that renders in one column on-screen and two columns printed. Or that renders as columns for a sighted user but is read aloud in the correct order for a blind user.

joe_adk 18y ago
In theory it does. And for simple things, it works great. I often find (and like the author, I assume this is because of my poor CSS skills) that I end up putting a div in a div in a div to achieve the look I'm going for; it's not in a table, but I've added presentation logic to my content, and would have saved 30 min just using a table.
neilk 18y ago
It doesn't, not even in theory. CSS did a good job of freeing us from layouts that were dominated by concrete layout, stretchy invisible gifs and so on. But CSS does not separate content and presentation. CSS still depends on concrete layout to work. You often can't have a feature of your style that doesn't have a div or whatever attached to it. (The pseudo-selectors are a horrible hack to try to fix this.) The problem is that we were all collectively duped into not wanting things that CSS didn't give us. An example: I used to lay out the music and entertainment section of my college newspaper. With CSS, you can't even do a multiple column layout that flows, and PageMaker had that on day one. Sometimes, I would design a headline that ripped right through articles in the middle of the page. Even diagonally. I can't imagine how you could do that in CSS, without tedious calculations and placing concrete divs into your text. Even if some of what I've said is possible, very, very few designers seem to be able to cope with this. The evidence is that most of them struggle just to get two-column layouts that don't even flow, if one judges by the number of tutorials.

3 ms·

In theory, it offers better separation of content from presentation. For example, a news article that renders in one column on-screen and two columns printed.

by dpifke 18y ago

joe_adk 18y ago
In theory it does. And for simple things, it works great. I often find (and like the author, I assume this is because of my poor CSS skills) that I end up putting a div in a div in a div to achieve the look I'm going for; it's not in a table, but I've added presentation logic to my content, and would have saved 30 min just using a table.
neilk 18y ago
It doesn't, not even in theory. CSS did a good job of freeing us from layouts that were dominated by concrete layout, stretchy invisible gifs and so on. But CSS does not separate content and presentation. CSS still depends on concrete layout to work. You often can't have a feature of your style that doesn't have a div or whatever attached to it. (The pseudo-selectors are a horrible hack to try to fix this.) The problem is that we were all collectively duped into not wanting things that CSS didn't give us. An example: I used to lay out the music and entertainment section of my college newspaper. With CSS, you can't even do a multiple column layout that flows, and PageMaker had that on day one. Sometimes, I would design a headline that ripped right through articles in the middle of the page. Even diagonally. I can't imagine how you could do that in CSS, without tedious calculations and placing concrete divs into your text. Even if some of what I've said is possible, very, very few designers seem to be able to cope with this. The evidence is that most of them struggle just to get two-column layouts that don't even flow, if one judges by the number of tutorials.