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I have just started doing web programming in the last month after several years of applications programming. It feels like to me, and someone please tell me wh

• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  • dm2 13y ago
    And no longer have to support IE7 (if you're lucky).
• kmfrk 13y ago
  90% of webdesign is dealing with errant behaviour. It's why it's so frustrating when people treat front-end design with disdain as something trivially easy. Of course, if you only decide to serve the newest version of Chrome and Safari, it can be easy to remember that there people out their who don't - or can't use them.
  • syncerr 13y ago
    > webdesign It's web development you're referring to.
    • jiggy2011 13y ago
      Without wishing to descend too much into semantics the accepted definitions (at least within the industry) seem to be that "design" is basically Graphics/Layout (so includes HTML/CSS) and development is programming (either client or server side).
      • matthewmacleod 13y ago
        I don't agree. Design is design, development is split into front- and back-end specialisations. Some developers straddle both, but there are few people who are both (good) designers and developers. I don't know of anybody within the industry who would refer to a front-end developer as a "designer."
        • jiggy2011 13y ago
          It depends if you are programming or simply describing page layout. Front end development could also include things like Javascript. There are plenty of designers who are not Javascript programmers but who can use CSS etc.
      • simonw 13y ago
        HTML and CSS are programming.
        • jiggy2011 13y ago
          You could probably argue that in a technical sense but it's a person who works with HTML/CSS but not say JS etc would probably be considered a designer more than a programmer.
          • simonw 13y ago
            I've worked at a bunch of different companies (Yahoo!, The Guardian, various smaller companies) and in all of them the "designers" were the people who did the visual design using Photoshop and Illustrator - those people rarely if ever wrote HTML and CSS, and almost never to production level standards. The people writing production-ready HTML and CSS were known as "web developers" or "client-side/front-end engineers".
• ams6110 13y ago
  Purists will attack if you do this, but if you just want to get something done, using tables for layout often solves a lot of these headaches. Horizontal and vertical alignment of left, right, center, top, middle, bottom are quick and easy. Edit: since you are a new developer, let me add that "ugly hackery" is what you quickly arrive at once you start doing anything of reasonable complexity (read: stuff that's actually useful). Handling the edge cases is what consumes most of the code in real production applications, and this is conveniently omitted from the beautifully clean code presented in tutorials and examples.
• thurn 13y ago
  We're working on solving these problems with new tools (flexbox in this particular case), but it takes time for those tools to become widely usable. You can look at e.g. Google's Polymer project for a glimpse at the vision for web programming in the future.
• dsego 13y ago
  Some would argue that whole doing the web with markup and stylesheets thing is completely wrong (Bret Victor comes to mind). And I tend to agree. CSS is a hack, heck, HTML itself is a hack. Some material: http://www.raizlabs.com/blog/2006/09/25/ten-reasons-why-css-sucks http://www.raizlabs.com/blog/2006/09/25/ten-reasons-why-css-... http://diveintohtml5.info/past.html http://diveintohtml5.info/past.html
• blhack 13y ago
  I'd love to know why just using tables is wrong. The user gets what they want, the designer gets what they want, and the only people unhappy are some purists. why? what about this is wrong?
  • chrislomax 13y ago
    I'm no purist but I am in the mindset, "you wouldn't use a fork to eat soup". I do agree though that it is a pain when something is easily achievable in tables but doesn't work in normal CSS. Vertical alignment being one of them. What does annoy me is when you see people creating "CSS table" systems. I'm not being funny but that is just plain stupid. I saw a whole project dedicated to replicating the behaviour of a table. I started developing when tables were fine to use for all layouts and I feel CSS was adopted as a layout too early without some very basic things being answered.
  • wmkn 13y ago
    If it solves your problem there is nothing wrong with it. However, tables are considered problematic because they encode the layout of the page in the HTML. Ideally, you would semantically structure your page using HTML and add style and layout using CSS. This way of working would allow for maximum flexibility - you can restyle your page without ever touching the HTML. If you use tables it becomes much more difficult because the table already adds a certain fixed layout. Unfortunately the real world hardly ever works like this.
    • ahallock 13y ago
      I think people have gone too far with this mindset. I develop pages using a mostly semantically structured approach, but I'm not afraid to sprinkle layout-only elements where they make sense, especially when using grids.
  • jsiarto 13y ago
    Tables are for tabular data--designing with HTML/CSS isn't perfect, but using tables for layout is an even less-elegant solution. It leads to a markup soup of nested tags and tables and difficult-to-maintain codebase. Good design and good markup go hand-in-hand and often you need to strike a balance between flashy visual design and solid underlying structure. This is also why visual designers should understand how their designs get implemented in HTML and CSS--it will create a restraint and limit the amount of "hacks" you have to do to make a design work. Also remember that not everyone views the web in a browser. Having well structured markup helps those that use screen readers or alternate methods of browsing the web.
• crazygringo 13y ago
  As someone who's done an insane amount of front-end programming, you're entirely right. Sometimes I wish I could get back all the brain cells that I've wasted on the hundreds of "little tricks" you need to know to get things working -- and then working cross-browser. Short answer: CSS is just a horribly, horribly, terribly badly designed language. It's the absolute worst. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise. It's that, it's what we've got, and it is awfully powerful in many ways. But it's complete rubbish in others, which include a lot of incredibly basic layout things.
  • Skalman 13y ago
    I agree that it's a disaster, but: Is there any better language? I feel that very few of the "native" variants have APIs that are simpler to deal with. (Of course Sass is much better than vanilla CSS, but it's basically the same if you strip away the sugar)
    • sker 13y ago
      XAML is very well designed, not for the web though. It was designed from the ground up to be consistent with only one implementation, as opposed to CSS, which evolved over the years on multiple implementations. It can get quite verbose since it's XML-based, but at least what you code is what you get.
      • platz 13y ago
        I've not built apps in xaml but I've heard the that its a PITA once your app gets to a certain size and complexity.
        • sker 13y ago
          I agree, I just think it's well designed and consistent. Plus, CSS can also be a royal PITA, that's why I take refuge in back-end development when possible.
      • Skalman 13y ago
• thekingshorses 13y ago
  Just wondering. Why did you decided to become a web developer after so many years? Usually developers try to find a way to solve the problem because they are engineers and that is what engineers should do. HTML, CSS and JS wasn't invented to what it has become today. It has evolved thanks to people like you and me who has find ways to use to our advantage. Example AJAX was existed since dark ages (IE5+) but no one used/knew about it. Google used that in google maps in 2004. Now, pirates are using it in usenet/torrent applications (utorrent, sabnzbd, sickbeard etc), or 3d rendering in the cloud (http://home.lagoa.com/ http://home.lagoa.com/). If you are waiting for something better to be found, i think you will have to wait long time. There is nothing on horizon that is as simple as HTML. For me, hardest part is in the web development is to deal with designers and product managers.
  • gamegoblin 13y ago
    I'm not a web developer. I just wanted to add a bit of web development skills to my set of abilities so I've been learning the Django framework and the nuances of HTML/CSS/JS.
• bane 13y ago
  It's absolutely stupid and frustrating. Almost nothing in modern web design just works and it's because of both a badly written standard and badly written implementations. I get it that HTML is supposed to be for content, CSS for layout and JS for programmatic logic, but the house of cards, duct tape, bailing wire and chewing gum that goes into making a web application is astonishing. I almost think it would be easier for somebody to come up with an entirely different "web application/dynamic document layout" technology stack with a sane and well-working model all the way through, so that stupid basic things like vertical alignment don't go unfixed year after year after year and we end up with the teetering tower of hacks we have today. We pretty much know what we want out of the web, somebody should just go build it from top to bottom all over again and throw out the huge train wreck we have to deal with today. Sure it would take a while to catch on, but I bet a more efficient set of tools and display environments would rapidly catch on. We've done it before and replaced older broken technologies with newer, why not do it again?
  • lutusp 13y ago
    > I almost think it would be easier for somebody to come up with an entirely different "web application/dynamic document layout" technology stack with a sane and well-working model all the way through, so that stupid basic things like vertical alignment don't go unfixed year after year after year and we end up with the teetering tower of hacks we have today. Yes, but if someone managed to create a logical, concise Web publishing standard that was something other than a can of worms, it would be a proprietary system, most likely patented. Which means no one would voluntarily adopt it. The advantage of a public, open-source, no-one-in-charge system like we have now is that it's collaborative, democratic, and free. That's also its disadvantage. For a classic counterexample, look at Apple's products -- they create much more consistent and usable products than the rest of the marketplace. But as many have said, Apple is a walled garden. If an Apple product happens to do what you want with no changes, then fine, otherwise you're out of luck. Freedom is messy. Democratic technology seems always to veer toward chaos.
    • bane 13y ago
      I wonder if this is a result of a broken committee process that should have had a benevolent dictator in charge of it instead.
• CmdrKrool 13y ago
  My journey: See this well trafficked "CSS sucks"-type article, Ctrl-F the comments for John Nagle, be tantalized at the hints of how it could be so much better: http://www.raizlabs.com/blog/2006/09/25/ten-reasons-why-css-sucks/ http://www.raizlabs.com/blog/2006/09/25/ten-reasons-why-css-... Look up "constraint-based layout" and more specifically "constraint cascading style sheets". You'll find papers such as this one: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.101.4819 http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.101.4... and this one: http://csis.pace.edu/~marchese/CS835/Lec7/mmJournal.pdf http://csis.pace.edu/~marchese/CS835/Lec7/mmJournal.pdf thoroughly describing such a system. Find "GSS - Grid Style Sheets" at http://gridstylesheets.org/ http://gridstylesheets.org/ , "an implementation of Badros & Borning's Constraint Cascading Style Sheets". This is still half on my todo list, but it seems like the real thing. The catch? Relies on Javascript. Dream of a world in which this kind of system was built into browsers as the primary way of doing layout <insert Simpsons happy dancing people gif here>.
  • cousin_it 13y ago
    Best comment in this thread IMO. Thanks! Some key parts from John Nagle's comments: It’s not that CSS is hard; it’s that CSS is bad. (...) The worst problem with DIV-based layout is that the layout system is too weak. (...) There’s no way to relate a DIV to anything but its predecessor, its parent, or an absolute position. (...) Table layouts allow table cells which span multiple rows and columns. If all tables could do were simple grids of cells, the CSS approach might make sense, but tables are more general than that.
• rimantas 13y ago
  Be glad you did not have to do this when IE5/6 was still around and Firefox was starting to go strong. Sites with sole purpose todocument all the hacks you need to do to force IE to behave a still around.
• dylan-m 13y ago
  One of the problems is we often have people doing web design was if it's print design. Find yourself a focused web designer who really understands the medium and, chances are, you won't run into this sort of problem. A good web designer understands that different browsers are going to have different capabilities, and build graceful degradation into the design. A good web designer knows that screens come in all shapes and sizes, and will avoid raster graphics and px-units wherever possible. CSS, from my experience, makes it very easy to do web design the right way and very hard to do it any other way. It's just that the right way is often a little different from what people expect. If you accept that <i>the browser is the boss</i>, you'll be a lot happier, and incidentally your users will be a lot happier as well. The trouble is people coming from other platforms or mediums often expect 100% control, and for that it really doesn't hold your hand.
• chestnut-tree 13y ago
  "...the amount of hackery that goes into making webpages look the way web designers want them to is astounding." I totally agree. For example, the CSS box model sounds so simple and elegant at first, but when you add dozens of styles and elements to your page, the interaction between different styles can quickly become horribly messy no matter how disciplined you are with your CSS code. Beyond a certain number of styles, CSS inheritance turns into a black art. CSS simply doesn't scale well for anything beyond relatively simple pages. A huge part of designing web pages is layout and spacing and yet positioning and spacing elements remains ridiculously messy and convoluted (even with CSS3). You could also argue that tools like SASS and LESS are in effect sticking-plasters for inadequacies in CSS. I know hindsight is a wonderful thing, but if we were designing CSS today from scratch, I think it would be designed very differently.
  • babby 13y ago
    CSS could be redeemable if; the box model defaulted to box-sizing: border-box;. If vertical-align and margin: auto (or variants) worked with variable heights and widths, and on all elements. If percentages of heights worked inside all elements. It seems like flex-box fixes a lot of this, but at the same time, it could be so much easier. You're right though. CSS would be so much different and so much more gloriously painless to use. I can even imagine a better styling engine allowing for applications like macaw, dreamweaver to actually generate properly good CSS and thus building sites with a GUI would finally be plausible.
• steveax 13y ago
  We sorta had that already. It was called Flash (or Silverlight, etc. pick your poison) and while it was easier for authors to do many things, it sucked for users in more ways than I can count.