Browsers will never get it right [was Re:Blocked-base parsing?]

> This 'marketing people' comment had earlier been made, and I guess it had
> been invalidated by the fact that marketing and programming are two
> separate things.

That they are, but this highlights an even bigger problem. This
feature is designed to make adjustments for full-scale browsers with
major, but imcomplete feature support. There is still the problem that
many designs rely on the idea that they are in an 800x600 environment
with 16 million colors or better, and this environment will have a
keyboard and a mouse.

This, doesn't really apply to my 200x160 phone that can display a
decent number of characters but looks terrible on your site because
your background picture doesn't work well against the text on it.

CSS is really only good for PC clients and certain device clients.
Most pages that I've tried using on say my phone just come out
illegible.

I guess the point I'm trying to make a subset of the larger point I'm
trying to make. Designers are just going to be frustrated if they
fight for exact layout and formatting. And why?

Come up with a scene for a story, write it down in outline or timeline
form and be precise. This will be your spec.

Then write the story from the outline or timeline. It should be at
least a page long, or better yet two.
Then put that piece of paper away.
The rewrite the story from the same outline/timeline using the same
rules for length.

I can garuntee anyone without a photographic memory will have subtle
differences if not major differences in their output. And it was the
same person writing it. The longer you wait between writings the
further off they'll be.

Software is like that. It's a miracle the browser's outputs are as
close as they are. It speaks well of the effort put into the specs and
test suites and browser developers. But it does show a fairly
fundamental problem. How the hell can an author expect to pull this
off given the rise of browsers and browser versions across the web.

Highly styled pages will always look bad in many places. Rules like
this one are designed to allow for even more highly styled pages. I'm
against any rule to merely puts a new glossy coat of paint over an
old, ulgy problem.
 
-- 

Orion Adrian


-- 

Orion Adrian

Received on Wednesday, 14 September 2005 11:20:35 UTC