Chicken-waving?

[Mary Ellen Curtin]

I've been looking at source code for a lot of web designers' sites, and I
frequently
see:

- DOCTYPE spec
- link to a style sheet
- but still plenty of old-fashioned repetitive formatting embedded in the
page body, which
is laid out with tables

Is there any *good* reason to do this, or is it just ceremonial
chicken-waving?

Mary Ellen
Doctor Science, MA

http://www.livejournal.com/users/mecurtin/

[David Dorward]

Re: Chicken-waving?

Mary Ellen Curtin wrote:
[color=blue]
> I've been looking at source code for a lot of web designers' sites, and I
> frequently see:
>
> - DOCTYPE spec[/color]

Becuase they learned that all HTML documents must have a doctype... even if
they haven't learned about following a DTD.
[color=blue]
> - link to a style sheet[/color]

Because you can't do a:hover with obsolete markup.
[color=blue]
> - but still plenty of old-fashioned repetitive formatting embedded in the
> page body, which is laid out with tables[/color]

"It works"

--
David Dorward http://dorward.me.uk/

[Jim Dabell]

Re: Chicken-waving?

Mary Ellen Curtin wrote:
[color=blue]
> I've been looking at source code for a lot of web designers' sites, and I
> frequently
> see:
>
> - DOCTYPE spec[/color]

I'd guess that it's either inserted automatically by their editor, or they
are using it to get into a certain doctype switching mode.

[color=blue]
> - link to a style sheet[/color]

How else would you be unfriendly to your visitors by switching off the
underlines on all your links? Seriously though, people like the shiny
"new" features of CSS, and want to use them without putting in any effort
to learn how to construct a website properly.

[color=blue]
> - but still plenty of old-fashioned repetitive formatting embedded in the
> page body, which is laid out with tables
>
> Is there any *good* reason to do this, or is it just ceremonial
> chicken-waving?[/color]

There's a case to be made for laying out your page with tables, yet doing
everything else in CSS - not a particularly strong case at all, and it's
getting weaker by the day, but CSS-P is the traditionally buggy area of CSS
that people have the most problems with, so even if you aren't willing to
throw away your table layouts just yet, you might want to use CSS wherever
else you can.

But in the majority of cases, I suspect you are right, and it is just
"chicken waving" :)

--
Jim Dabell

[Nick Kew]

Re: Chicken-waving?

In article <jft%a.993$2K5. 98693191@news.n etcarrier.net>, one of infinite monkeys
at the keyboard of "Mary Ellen Curtin" <mecurtin@alumn iSPAM.princeton ME.eduNOT> wrote:
[color=blue]
> Is there any *good* reason to do this, or is it just ceremonial
> chicken-waving?[/color]

<guess class="wild">
Someone told them CSS is the way to do it, but nothing about why.
So it's unmotivated tokenism.
</guess>

Oh, wait a minute: you said web deezyners. That'll be the wannabes in
a back bedroom[1], putting in a stylesheet to tell their
victim^H^Hclien ts they can do it.

[1] for values of back bedroom that may include smart office where
accompanied by sufficient bullshit^H^Hmar keting skills.

--
Nick Kew

In urgent need of paying work - see http://www.webthing.com/~nick/cv.html

[Mary Ellen Curtin]

Re: Chicken-waving?

Joel opined:[color=blue]
> Any possibility these people aren't stupid or evil, and are simply
> easing themselves through the transformation?[/color]

I think there's something to that, but not everything. Here's an example:

http://www.need2know.com/

What you see, looking at the style sheet:

http://www.need2know.com/include/style.css

is that they have indeed mostly used CSS for item formatting (e.g. links),
not at all
for positioning. I think it's a combination of "using CSS for things it can
do that other
methods do poorly or not at all" and "not having the time to redo the code
to be consistent."
So they end up with a "layered look", where Best Practices of 2002 are laid
over BP of 2001 which are over BP of 2000. In other words -- cruft, but
cruft that works.

Now *we*, of course, know that by adhering to the One True Path of
validated, standards-
compliant code we'll never, ever have to worry about layered cruft, right?
Right?

*cicadas*

Mary Ellen
Doctor Science, MA

http://www.livejournal.com/users/mecurtin/

[Headless]

Re: Chicken-waving?

Mary Ellen Curtin wrote:
[color=blue]
>Now *we*, of course, know that by adhering to the One True Path of
>validated, standards-compliant code we'll never, ever have to
>worry about layered cruft, right?[/color]

Nitpick: valid, standard compliant code != non layered cruft.

To achieve that code needs to be *correct*.


Headless

--
Email and usenet filter list: http://www.headless.dna.ie/usenet.htm

[Stephen Poley]

Re: Chicken-waving?

On Sat, 16 Aug 2003 13:29:36 -0400, "Mary Ellen Curtin"
<mecurtin@alumn iSPAM.princeton ME.eduNOT> wrote:
[color=blue]
>I've been looking at source code for a lot of web designers' sites, and I
>frequently see:
>
>- DOCTYPE spec
>- link to a style sheet
>- but still plenty of old-fashioned repetitive formatting embedded in the
>page body, which
>is laid out with tables
>
>Is there any *good* reason to do this, or is it just ceremonial
>chicken-waving?[/color]

Probably a number of reasons, which vary from site to site.

- In some cases because it's too big a job to completely rebuild in one
go a site that was originally done a few years ago, so there is a
transition period.

- In some cases because the number of NN4 visitors is still large enough
to make one stick to those bits of CSS which NN4 supports. (I'm still
getting 3%-4% visitors from NN4-era browsers; I don't fuss too much
about cosmetics for them, as long as the site is readable, but I can
understand that some people might).

- In some cases as a result of the tools in use.

- And doubtless in some (many?) cases because the authors actually don't
understand what they're doing.

--
Stephen Poley

http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/