"Its verbose, hard and slow to change, hard for end users to customise, works terribly in any other context than a desktop browser, plays terribly with all other web tooling."
[citation needed] x 4.
This is a recitation of the propaganda, yes. However, propaganda is not a logical argument. What about "<center>" is verbose? Do you have a CSS solution that is actually shorter than "<center></center>", while also being good CSS (and not just using 1 character class names)? Do end users really have a problem customizing the center tag? How so? CSS and XPath do not particularly have a problem with it. I use this site on my 3DS sometimes and it seems to work reasonably well. What "web tooling" matters, and how does it interact with Arc so horribly?
During the old CSS wars I sort of understood the argument for deprecating it, but with the way browser engines have been going, there's really no reason to pretend there's any reason to get rid of the element, because it's just one line in a definition file somewhere that specifies it as a block element with a certain default style.
HTML is presentation and CSS is the design and one does not mix the two on a properly designed site. If they are independent, it become possible to change the look of the site, independent of the data presented.
Yes, that means you use tables, for tabular data, but forums are not tabular data. They are more akin to lists, which have their own rules.
Yes, that's the propaganda. I don't think reality has worked out that way. At least, I've never seen a site get overhauled via CSS alone on anything other than demo sites designed for that explicit purpose. Since CSS now lets you override anything and turn tables into lists and lists into tables, it hardly matters any more, and the entire concept of "semantic" is just a sick joke unless the word "context" shows up somewhere, which it never seems to in these conversations, and in particular, hasn't got much place here either.
Comments
"Its verbose, hard and slow to change, hard for end users to customise, works terribly in any other context than a desktop browser, plays terribly with all other web tooling."
[citation needed] x 4.
This is a recitation of the propaganda, yes. However, propaganda is not a logical argument. What about "<center>" is verbose? Do you have a CSS solution that is actually shorter than "<center></center>", while also being good CSS (and not just using 1 character class names)? Do end users really have a problem customizing the center tag? How so? CSS and XPath do not particularly have a problem with it. I use this site on my 3DS sometimes and it seems to work reasonably well. What "web tooling" matters, and how does it interact with Arc so horribly?
During the old CSS wars I sort of understood the argument for deprecating it, but with the way browser engines have been going, there's really no reason to pretend there's any reason to get rid of the element, because it's just one line in a definition file somewhere that specifies it as a block element with a certain default style.
HTML is presentation and CSS is the design and one does not mix the two on a properly designed site. If they are independent, it become possible to change the look of the site, independent of the data presented.
Yes, that means you use tables, for tabular data, but forums are not tabular data. They are more akin to lists, which have their own rules.
Yes, that's the propaganda. I don't think reality has worked out that way. At least, I've never seen a site get overhauled via CSS alone on anything other than demo sites designed for that explicit purpose. Since CSS now lets you override anything and turn tables into lists and lists into tables, it hardly matters any more, and the entire concept of "semantic" is just a sick joke unless the word "context" shows up somewhere, which it never seems to in these conversations, and in particular, hasn't got much place here either.
I hate to bring that site up, but 4chan's recent overhaul was a move to HTML5 and CSS from table-based design for that very reason.
HN Discussion on it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3902976
.a, .bunch, .of, .selectors, .youd, .use, .anyhow { text-align: center; }
one time, in one place, in the CSS is a lot terser than:
<center></center>
repeated 20x per page.