Arc Tangent

[Oops! Meant to post this last week. Ah well.]

A link sent to me by klepas: http://​give​u​pan​duseta​bles​.com/.

There really does come a point, when you’re try­ing to put a site together, at which all the fuss­ing and prod­ding you’re doing to CSS becomes irri­tat­ing beyond belief. You get it work­ing in one browser, only to dis­cover that another imple­ments the box model slightly dif­fer­ently or doesn’t quite like to float things the way the stan­dard says.

It’s dis­heart­en­ing that the web has become such a big part of our lives, and we still can’t get the lay­out of things right. Joel Spol­sky explains why it’s such a prob­lem, sort of, in his arti­cle Mar­t­ian Head­sets.

Spol­sky argues that there’s no ‘stan­dard imple­men­ta­tion’ for web devel­op­ers to test against, and that specs are really hard to read (no argu­ment there). I think he’s got the prob­lem around the wrong way though; the prob­lem isn’t web devs test­ing against a stan­dard imple­men­ta­tion, the prob­lem is browsers han­dling the stan­dards incor­rectly — and we do have a ref­er­ence imple­men­ta­tion for browser devel­op­ers to work against! The ACID2 tests from the Web Stan­dards Project.

How­ever you look at it, some­times it’s just eas­ier to give up and use tables. Even if it is a dirty, dirty thing to do.