Recently, as I was struggling with some CSS layout issues, I had a a scary thought. I flashed back to college, when I used to use NROFF to format my papers before printing them out on the line printer. (Yes, I’m that old.) I couldn’t help but wonder… This is progress?
I know we’ve come a long way since then… right? Somehow, HTML/CSS seems so archaic, and the primary benefit is that (theoretically) it works across platforms and devices…. and of course, that it can be searched and indexed by Google.
And, it does work across platforms and devices, mostly. But it doesn’t really – especially in the world of CSS – there are varying interpretations of the “standards” (just mention IE6 to a CSS coder and watch them start to twitch) and hacks to work around the quirks. Of course, one can do beautiful layouts if one has the design talent and technical skills. But most of the time, I feel like I’m writing in assembly code.
Job ads want people who can “code html by hand” and “dream in css”. Heck, let’s have them write their own browser rendering engine too. I understand why this is — WYSIWYG tools are notorious for creating horrible CSS and HTML code. But it seems like the solution would be better tools, not hand crafting HTML and CSS. I mean, how many years have we been optimizing C compilers? Now we’re in this weird hybrid world where we have tools that will let us fill in property boxes and type out the CSS for us — but that doesn’t solve the standards issues. I, for one, am more than ready for web UI development to catch up with the desktop.