Why is there no float: center?

I have often wondered the same thing.  It would be rather useful. 

Nice site BTW. :)

Yet another example of the many many aspects of how braindead the CSS’ specification is.

Oh, did I mention how I find CSS absolutely infuriating?

the HTML tag was filtered out my comment
I wrote attribute align=center in a table tag..

Yeah!  If they’re going to take away my tag, the least they can do is offer up a float: center.  Good point!

That I do, but I wouldn’t mind a float: center at all.

Trevor: 

Why does CSS infuriate me?  I don’t think I could have answered nearly as clearly as was illustrated by Barney: The CSS spec is highly pedantic and complete values form over substance and usability as Barney unwittingly displayed on the spec authors behalf by proxy.

I mean margin: 0 auto instead of float:center?  WTF?!?  Do you know how long it took me to figure out that I needed to use margin: 0 auto?  And that’s one of probably 10 reasons why CSS is totally brain-dead.  There is a blog post I’ve planned for a really long time “Top 10 Reasons why CSS Sux”; maybe I’ll finally get to it soon.

Don’t get me wrong, the idea of separating content and presentation is masterful and clearly the right thing to do. But CSS is just wrong on three fundamental levels:

1.) The CSS cascading architecture is just a horrible choice for the use-case. As a site grows so grows the CSS and there is no way using CSS to divide and conquer as programmers can do by hiding information with objects and functions.

2.) The CSS specification was (obviously) filled with pedants who, like Barney above, worried far more about redundancy and esoteric arguments than ensuring the spec was as easy and as obvious to implement and use as possible. Their pendency hoisted tremendous inefficiency of implementation on an unsuspecting public.

3.) There are just too many use-cases that are either impossible to do with CSS or that require complex and fragile hacks that required untold numbers of expert hours to discover and document.  And then a new browser version comes out and the hack is broken.

Case in point: Why is the 3 column layout such a holy grail when one can implement a fully working 3 column layout using tables in under 30 seconds?  Answer: Because CSS is brain-dead. The CSS spec could have implemented explicit relationships between elements but obviously didn’t

And yes this is definitely a contrarian view when compared to the chorus of standardistas but I contend that the standardistas have never stopped to consider whether the CSS standard was a standard worth supporting. I think instead they’ve just acted like mushrooms and appreciated those who’ve shoveled shit onto them (that’s more of a commentary on human nature than on standardistas, btw.)

And we all know that standardistas complain that browsers don’t implement the standard correctly. I think the blame should be on the CSS spec authors and not on the browsers. Had they not made the spec so convoluted and counter-intuitive and omitted direction on so many aspects maybe the browsers would have had no problem at all implementing the standard.  Don’t blame the mirror for the ugly face staring back at you!

BTW, I spent some time on the HTML5 working group and found it was filled with exactly the same type of pedants I’m complaining about here, and that is why I also don’t hold high hopes for HTML5. And I do also realize that given the install base of browsers nothing can erase CSS at this point but that still doesn’t want to keep me from venting on the issue.

I you haven’t noticed I do feel pretty passionately about this issue.

@Mike-

Wow, I didn’t realize that you had such strong feelings about the CSS specs! It’s good to be passionate about it, that means that you want it to improve.

I agree, there are some pieces of CSS that you just wonder: what the hell? Obviously, I just had one of those moments, which prompted me to write the post. I would be interested in seeing your “Top 10 List” though.

The idea behind CSS is definitely a great idea, but you are right in saying it could have been much better. But, what can we do now? Think about what has to happen in order for something to be changed:

<ol>
<li>The spec for the features must be written, and hopefully clearly</li>
<li>Browser creators have to implement the features and do tons of testing</li>
<li>They release their update/new version</li>
<li>Somehow you must get everyone to download the updated version</li>
</ol>

While I agree, some people complain too much about browsers (can we stop saying browsers and just say IE6?) not implementing the standards correctly, that is a part of the problem. While the problem may have been created by unclear specifications, the slowness of browser creators to react is unreal. I mean the fact that IE6 is still the most popular browser 7 years later is crazy! The combination of ignorance of users, crappy coding, politics, and unclear specifications are what have gotten us to where we are now.

But really, what can we do? Besides continuing to support the effort? I appreciate you taking the time to add your valuable insight, and I think just having conversations like this openly help to increase the knowledge of others.

@Barney-

You make a good point. Rarely are specifications ever clear enough for things to be implemented perfectly, hence the inconsistent implementation across different browsers.

But like I said to Mike, what can we do? Besides continue to use CSS the way it is now and supporting new versions and standards. Just think, if there were standard clear specifications when developing CSS, and they did not leave it up to the browser to interpret; we would be in a better place.

@Barney:
First, let me start with an apology. I vented my frustration regarding the combination of the problems I see in CSS and the process involving people who are more interested in minutiae than making it usable and effective. Anyway, sorry.

Regarding your point about float:center not making sense I get your point but my point is that you are thinking in the strict sense and the human mind doesn’t work that way hence strictness reduces usability. My point is: So what if float:center has some logical inconsistencies; it’s what is “obvious” to most people so just map it’s effect to “margin:0 auto;” and be done with it.

As for the “what’s wrong with current methods”, maybe you misunderstood what I meant by “hacks.” I’m referring to the fact that so many people have to spend so much time coming up with way to do what I like to describe as “Tricking CSS into getting a layout it’s trying it’s damndest to keep you from getting.”  Compare that to what I’ve proposed below. Here are just a few of the types of “hacks” I was talking about (the first one being especially good):

http://www.killersites.com/blog/2006/css-3-column-layout/
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/holygrail
http://www.glish.com/css/7.asp

The problem is that getting CSS takes far too much effort to learn and make work when CSS could have made it brain dead easy, and I call those techniques to workaround that of good design hacks. You may not like that usage, but we can then just agree to disagree because they are hack to me. And the last one illustrates how you can’t get equal length columns using CSS, but it’s a no-brainer with HTML tables; why is that?!?

And as for “the www-style list”, therein lies madness.  That’s exactly what I found so infuriating; trying to reason with the pedants on the w3c lists who strike for logical purity and strict ideology vs. trying to make standards simple, workable, and easily usable.

@Trevor:
Honestly I don’t know what we can realistically do, but I know I would like to start with something else besides CSS using a clean-sheet approach. Maybe ESS for “encapsulate-able style sheets” (I suck at naming) and only allow pragmatists on the working group (okay, *that* won’t happen!)  Then we could run them side-by-side and browsers could use ESS if they support it otherwise CSS. Eventually ESS would take over and we’d be looking at CSS like we look at IE5 today.

In my perfect world ESS would be specced so that there was as little ambiguity as possible and that everything deffered to what made it easier for the HTML coder/designer to use it. It should do things in ways that are most “obvious” to the least skilled person even if those ways don’t make as much strict sense when one really considers it much like how Barney is claiming float:center makes no sense. Maybe it doesn’t make sense when strictly analyzed but it was the thing you though was obvious and by god it was what I thought was obvious. That failed assumption on my part was what required me to spent literally a day trying to figure out why it wouldn’t work. It was so “obvious” to be I didn’t even think to verify it’s correctness and instead looked elsewhere for the problem.

ESS would also define relationship between elements, i.e. for this markup:

...

...
...
...
...
...

And then be able to do something like:

!define table {
  row { @header }
  row {
  col { @nav }
  col { @content }
  col { @sidebar }
  }
  row { @footer }
} 

Seems to me with the HTML table spec so well implemented it would be impossible to screw this up.

ESS should also allow HTML segments to be styled regardless of their parent’s styling (i.e. ability to disable cascading from above.) Maybe we want to style the content area w/o any of the styling from the things outside the content affecting. Maybe:

#content { !reset; ... }

ESS should also have ways to explicitly differentiate between those things that affect and element itself (color, height, width), those things that affect how it deals with it’s parents (i.e. margin, padding, etc.) and those things that affect it’s children (i.e. text-align)

#foo {
color:red;
align[parents]:center;
align[children]:center;
}

Or

#foo {
color:red;
^align:center;
~align:center;
}

And ESS should ensure everything is atomic, i.e. that no commands do two things like “position” currently does.

There’s still more but if I write about CSS but if I did it all here I’d have no need to ever write my Top 10 post!

Wow, how such a small CSS issue caused a big discussion here. Maybe it is not that small at all? I will probably always wondering why one omitted float:center from css spec.

I really don’t understand how even this many people can think that ‘floating’ towards a point on the convas makes sense from a theory point of view.  I think float’s left and right make sense, and I think automatic verical margin make sense as a mental image.

Floating is a result of a gravity-like force. No matter where something is or what it is next to, it will get ‘pulled’ by floating behaviour. Something being in the vertical middle of the page is not the result of some force being applied to it — it’s taking into context the sixe of the object that contains it and making it equidistant to the edges.

For the record, is anybody saying that float:center is behaviour that can’t already be applied using margin:auto? I’m not sure whether this is new behaviour or just a clarification of terms people are after here.

So cenocre, you’re talking about behaviour that can’t be replicated with existing methods?

@cenocre: 

“This reminds me of the argument regarding innerHTML where purist would argue that one should use the DOM method that requires numerous lines of code each time one want to replace a small snippet of text. Turns out most are now using the much more straightforward and sensible innerHTML where all you need to do is document.getElementById(‘element’)[removed]=(‘NEW TEXT</’). Other than the B.S. of escaping certain characters and removing returns, it works much more simply and intuitively.”

Exactly!

@cenocre:
“I don’t want to use tables, but am tired of wasting time with CSS when the addition of something such as float:center would be so easy and make so much sense.”

Ditto.

@cenocre: No need to take exception to my characterization of Standardista’s view is “right” or logical. I was merely trying to be somewhat gracious (if that was still possible) after being otherwise so critical.  :-)

Reading your posts, I would not even say we are of like minds on this issue, I would say we are of one mind!  I completely agree with *everything* you’ve said, even the part about PhotoShop which I have recently been screaming at for how counter-intuitive it is in everything it does. Grrrr.

And don’t even get me started on regex in mod_rewrite….!

Hey Cenocre, when I google your alias I get “Did you mean: centre ” — This was clearly always meant to be your quest!

...And if we’re going to redefine the way CSS’s terminology is used, we should definitely make it centre. Hehehe.

All in all cenocre, I think you have to resign yourself to the fact that even the DOM and HT page layout are very complicated things.

You constantly refer to ‘the layman’ but as you’ve just said — and much as I suspected — you’re a professional web designer. Surely you must accept to some extent that the reason you’re making a living is because you’re undertaking skilled work that requires knowledge and expertise that other people don’t have?

I’m not saying it’s a contradiction to do something for a living and then say that in an ideal world your trade would be redundant — I believe in the abolishment of currency but I’m still happy to charge $400 a day! — but still, have some respect for your skills. At least once a week I’ll have a kind of loss-of-context experience where I’ll go “This is ridiculous… I’m using this abstract language that makes no sense to any of my friends to tell a machine how to make a document appear on screen…”, but that’s the nature of the beast. Coding has always been weird and difficult. Computers aren’t intuitive, and achieving professional results requires professional dedication to the craft.

@Barney:
“I’m not saying it’s a contradiction to do something for a living and then say that in an ideal world your trade would be redundant — I believe in the abolishment of currency but I’m still happy to charge $400 a day! — but still, have some respect for your skills.”

Wow, hats off to you for recognizing that. Most people who are so adamant about free and opensource get very testy when you suggest that maybe they should work for less money yet never see the irony! :-0

“Coding has always been weird and difficult. Computers aren’t intuitive, and achieving professional results requires professional dedication to the craft.”

While I agree, my position is that dedication to the craft means we should always be striving towards making computers adapt better to humans instead of forcing or accepting that humans would adapt to computers.

@Barney:  I’d be happy if half of the people on the standards committees were actually representing usability concerns of the users of HTML & CSS and not the technical concerns of browser and tools implementors.  But the reality is that is unlikely to happen so all I can do is vent when my frustration builds up too much. 

My hope was that people on the w3c would actually be willing to listen to other points of view but that was a false hope!  So I left the HTML5 working group because I do understand the definition of insanity (doing the same thing and expecting a different result) and I wasn’t (and am still not) insane.

Probably the best thing to do is advocate for a strong movement of people to return to using tables and other “bad” habits to force the issue. If the Standardistas can’t be pragmatic and focus on usability and efficiency of authoring then we should just do that which they would find truly repugnant (use tables for layout, oh the horrors!) until they realize that it would be better to actually be pragmatic and work with others to address their needs than to passive-aggressively act like spoiled children and take control of things to ensure they are exactly as they want in them to be in their own perfect vision of the world.

If you sensed a bit of seething resentment there, that’s mean you are insightful.

@Barney:

“I say there’s no problem whatsoever using tables”

There’s a segment of Standardistas that focus on semantics and they hate, I mean HATE the use of tables for anything that is not tabular data.  And in concept I agree with them but CSS has made layout so difficult I think that semantics should take a back seat until implementation becomes easier. 

It’s kinda like gasoline, at $1/gallon nobody looked for sustainable energy to replace it, but at $5 and $10/gallon things are and will change completely. Similarly if the Standardistas get their semantic markup in large by hoisting the pain of implementation on everyone else, and everyone else puts up with it because they are told by the standardistas that is it the “right” way to do things, the standardistas won’t feel the push to fix CSS. But if people revolt and stop using CSS for layout then the standardistas may actually feel compelled to fix things.

“But then again, doesn’t this go against your whole ethos — you’re complaining on the one hand that we need more obvious descriptive terms that the man on the street can easily understand, and you’re saying that the man on the street desperately needs a description based on cells and ‘floating’ boxes?”

You are completely discounting the way people learn, probably because maybe you’ve not studied it? I was a trainer for seven years and studied cognition and how people learn things so I know a little about this. Or maybe you attribute such strong value to things being consistent with your logical view of the world that you’re unable to cede that usability is important?

People rarely actually think logically about how things work; they only do that when all else fails them. They instead look for things that are similar and try to apply what they already know, and it’s not just the “dumb ones” that do this; everyone does it.

Trevor is clearly not a dumb one, from his blog he’s obviously very sharp and he did what I’m describing. It’s the way human cognition works. To go against that just adds an unneccesary cognitive burden, but it’s a burden that people who are extremely smart and knowledgable in a subject so often want to hoist onto those who are not as smart, not as knowledgeable, or more generally just don’t really care to understand at the same level, i.e. most people just want things to work and don’t really care to learn why things work or don’t work, especially with HTML & CSS.

As I’ve already said, most people don’t use logic to figure things out, they compare to what they already know that is similar and try to match patterns.

In this case consider CSS; very few people learn CSS before learning HTML otherwise how would they apply the former to the latter?  And in HTML they learn that when an attribute has an option for “left” and “right”, it also has an option for “center” (i.e. align.)  When they see “float” they assume “obviously” that it works the same way. But that fails them because some very pendatic people were more interested in logical purity than making CSS work the way that was most initutive.

What’s worse with CSS is that when you do things wrote, the browser doesn’t tell you it is wrong, it just doesn’t work and one is left to scratch their head to figure out why, or worse not even notice that it didn’t work!!! 

Here’s something that would make me feel a lot better about only having “margin:0 auto” instead of “float:center.”  If the CSS specification had a “debug” property or an “errors” property or an “report” property so that the spec explicitly stated that the user agent should somehow report not only errors but also suggestions. For example, one of the following:

  body { debug:on; }
  body { errors:show; }
  body { report:errors; }
 
Then anytime someone used “float:center” the user agent (browser) would somehow tell the user “ERROR: float:center is not valid. You probably want the behavior that margin:0 auto provides.”  But when I brought up such things in the various w3c standards circles they were all like “We can’t require error messages, that’s not the job of the spec.”  Sheesh.

“Sorry to come out with it but I can’t believe that for a second. Grab someone you know who doesn’t know CSS. Tell them that to centre something, they want to (obviously!) use ‘float’ or ‘table cells’. Is that really going to make sense?”

You really don’t get human learning and cognition or it’s importance, do you?  YES, if you ask people to center something they are going to look for an “center” attribute, not a “margin:0 auto.” Have you ever taught people HTML & CSS? You should try it before you go assuming that people will actually go through a logic process. NOTHING they have every done is like “margin:0 auto” but they have used “center” as an attribute.

“On the other hand, people remember margins as layout descriptors from the real world, I think they could understand that.”

From the real world?  In what context or use-case do people ever have to worry about specifying margins as “auto” “in the real world?”  This example I’m about to give is not in “the real world” (it’s still within a computer) but let’s take something that almost everyone who starts using CSS will have experience with; a word processor.  Yes, there are margins on the page but what word processors do you know that have an “auto center” option for left and right margins? MSWord sure as hell doesn’t. People are used to setting margins left and right, but they have no analog for “automatic margins.”

Next, let’s say someone inserts an image into a document; how do they center it?  They highlight it and then click the center button. What they don’t do is click a “margin” button and set left and right margins to auto!!! EVERYTHING people are use to trains them to look for “center” and does not train them to look for “margin:0 auto.” So “margin:0 auto” while logically correct is just a stupid way to do things in CSS given that humans are often the ones to write CSS.

But let me clarify; this “float:center” vs. “margin:0 auto”, while difficult for people to learn at first is not the issue I am most bothered by. The issue is instead the systemic disregard of certain working groups in the w3c, and especially within the CSS and HTML communities for how humans learn and for what makes implementation hard. The fact CSS is do difficult to deal with has cause billions of dollars of inefficiencies the world over from all the time spent trying to get a layout to work. Had the people involved in specifying CSS not been so concerned with logical purity and instead cared about actual usability and clarity of purpose we would not be having this debate nor would the world has wasted so much time and money on trying to make something work with was just ill-suited for purpose.

FWIW. I’m probably just pissing into the wind because nothing is likely to change just because I rant about it.

@Vordreller

“CSS is EASY”

Let me guess, you’ve never had to change the layout of a large complex website?

Or you’ve never actually had to implement a complex layout complete with columns with background colors?

Just curious, how long have you actually been developing web sites, and how many large sites have you built from scratch?

If CSS were so easy, YUI-CSS wouldn’t have been needed nor would YUI-CSS be so incredibly complex *internally* (but YUI-CSS have made CSS much easier to use so my hat’s off to them.)

“Anyway, I keep a strict boundary between what is markup and what is content”

Yes, that’s a great goal and I agree in concept, but CSS has made that far too difficult.  That’s why I posited that we’d be much better off with something that replaced CSS to achieve that same goal but that would actually be well-designed.

Truth be told, if something did come along to replace CSS it would be based on all that we’ve learned regarding the problems with CSS and the people who designed CSS didn’t have the benefit of that hindsight.

@Barney
“I’m sorry if I got a bit out of order with my last post, I didn’t mean to anger you (well, not that much in any case:) ).”

You didn’t anger me. The situation angers me and has long before you came out of the woodwork on this post. You’ve actually given me a foil against which to vent.

“I’m afraid to say I think you’re in a tiny minority regarding your frankly bizarre opinions…”

Now THAT angers me. By calling my opinions “in the minority” and “bizarre” you are attempting to marginalize them which is a classic dishonest debate technique like calling a political opponent an “extremist.” If you can’t debate the merits of the argument then you are not worthy of debate so let’s stick to the discussion points and don’t try to win by painting my arguments as not being worthy of consideration.

“on the difficulty of things and don’t really understand how CSS or programming in general work — and CSS is an incredibly basic form of programming.”

Are you trying to say that I don’t understand programming? This is your further attacking me with language rather than debating me on the merits.

The problem is I understand programming far too well, and I understand that CSS is a really poor design. Further, CSS isn’t even really programming, it’s a declarative language. CSS’ problems include inability to control scoping hence no way to reduce combinatorial complexity, many edge case it doesn’t handle, and an ideology that had it be too simple for its own good (i.e. CSS doesn’t allow you to define relationships between element types such as I illustrated with “ESS tables” above.)

“I develop for a living, I learnt this stuff from scratch and I’ve helped many a person learn it.”

From scratch?  Maybe that’s the problem.  You’ve not actually studied computer science from a university, right? Maybe that’s why you don’t know what you don’t know.

Would you tell a doctor who has had 10 years of medical school that you know better why you are sick?  Why do you assume that self-taught programming gives you enough background to fully understand programming?

I’ve got 20+ years of programming experience in all different languages and I know that in my twenties I was far surer of what was right and what was wrong then than I am now. Now in my 40’s I’ve had enough experience to learn how many of those things I thought were so smart actually turned out to have been not such a good idea after all.

Forgive me if I’m wrong, but my guess is you’ve got at most 1-3 year programming experience, and you are fully self-taught?

“You’d be amazed at the volume of previously non-technical people who have been empowered (to professional levels) by CSS.”

How do you know what would amaze me?  You make a lot of presumptive assumptions. Yes many people have been empowered, but not nearly as many as could have been had it been better designed and thus better implemented.

“It is an incredibly intuitive language…”

Well, that’s the opposite of my experience with literally hundreds of people I’ve interacted with.  See the group I organize that has almost 800 members who are interested in web but are mostly not full time developers:  http://web.meetup.com/32/

OTOH w/o benefit of usability testing to prove one way or another we’ll not be able to prove that it is or is not intuitive, it will just be our opinions.

“and its popularity and accessibility are testament to that.”

Hardly. Its popularity is due to the fact that the w3c designed and standardized it and because of that the major browsers implemented it. It has NOTHING to do with the quality of its design.  Had there been 2 other competing specs that users could choose to implement AND it had emerged on top then I’d agree but that hasn’t been the case. It’s “popular” because it is the only option.

“To be honest your notions on ‘debugging’ CSS instances that don’t achieve what the user meant them to… Is a kind of nail in the credibility coffin. You speak as if the computer is going to be the designer and the developer for you, and anticipate your complaints when it takes your vague instructions as given. Being so demanding of AI levels of intuition from what you might be trying to suggest from a machine… Is frankly just banal petulence.”

HUH?!?  What, are you thinking by attacking my credibility that you can avoid the discussion points and instead wound me so I run away?  You clearly don’t get it, do you?  You’ve (my guess is) empowered yourself to make a living using HTML & CSS and now you take any criticism of it as a personal affront.  Typical immature self-taught.

What I described where the computer recognizes obvious errors and generates an error message is a best practice for building a robust system not “banal petulance”, whatever that is. Generating error messages is exactly what compilers have been doing for decades. The fact that you would characterize is as “anticipating my complaints from vague instructions” and “being so demanding of AI levels of intuition” means you’ve clearly never read “The Dragon Book” cover-to-cover. (Don’t know what “The Dragon Book” is?  Google it.)  You’ve ignorance is just so blatantly obvious. Maybe you don’t know the old saying? “Better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.” Looks like you have been doing the latter.

Have you ever used a compiler, or even an interpreter like PHP, or has your limit only been HTML+CSS? 

Ever heard of “lint?” What I’m talking about is lint for CSS built into the browser. Don’t know what “lint” is?  Google it.  And Google “lint for css.”  What I’m proposing is a lint for css built into the browser. Clearly this is a new concept for you, but not a new concept among programmers.  (Maybe all those programmers who use lint are just being banally petulant?)

“I think you have to acknowledge the fact that you’re simply not half as patient, insightful or willing to learn as the millions out there who do understand this incredibly simple language.”

I think you have no clue what my skills or ability to learn are. It you were face to face I’d just you see what others locally think of me, but since you are obviously in Europe somewhere and not here in the USA locally with me I’ll say that I’m known among the various groups I attend (including the Drupal user group) as one of the fastest learners around. I’m also the one that always seemed to be tagged to give training presentations when others are not available. But I have no patience for stupid implementations, and CSS is a stupid implementation.  I would say it’s like the fact that I don’t suffer fools, but then my engagement with you on this issue would obviously discredit me if I were to say that.

I can make CSS do anything it can do. My gripe is that it is far too hard to use, especially for newbies (I care about them but evidently you don’t.) I know what is possible in good programming languages like C#, Java, Python, Perl, Ruby and even PHP, I know about encapsulation and information hiding and polymorphism and modularity, and it frustrates me that CSS is so backward as to not incorporate any of those features that could otherwise make using CSS more pleasant.

I also notice you never answered my questions:

—How many large web applications with complex CSS code developed by someone else have you had to come in and make major changes to?  What are the URLs?
—How many large web applications with complex CSS code have you developed from scratch? What are the URLs?

Or could it be you’ve only even used CSS for small personal websites? Yes, for small personal websites CSS is really easy and seems like a dream. But for large complex websites that dream becomes a nightmare, especially if you were not the one who originally developed the large complex website.

“I mean, would you ever try to help yourself with any of these concepts — even to the level of thinking them through on a practicality level or suggesting specifications — or are you honestly just outraged that someone isn’t serving them to you ready-made on a plate simply because you screamed loud enough?”

I really don’t even know what you are trying to say here but it seems insulting without basis.

>> By the way, were you really a trainer?

For seven years before the turn of the century, and occasionally the past several years:
http://mikeschinkel.com/blog/alittlebackgroundisinorder/

Why, are you acting surprised?

“PPS: Are you having us on in a bout of ‘contrarianism’?”

Yes, but not as a troll.  I fully believe CSS is stupid.

CSS has huge problem, but all you are giving is Pollyanna answers and defending what appears to be your beloved. If you are so capable rather than hurl veiled insults and employ dishonest debate techniques why don’t you present some examples that might explain that you have any credibility? 

For example, show me the book you wrote on programming (mine is here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0201570181; read the third comment).  Or show me large websites you’ve implemented (mine includes http://www.xtras.net (though it’s had small updates since I left) and http://atvillustrated.com). Or show me a large group of people where you present your web knowledge frequently that has a rating >=4 stars (mine is at http://web.meetup.com/32/) Or some me a place where you have presented an advanced computer topic and >=4 stars rating (one of mine is at http://drupal.meetup.com/4/calendar/6779397/) Show me something, anything that indicates you have even a smidgen of credibility.
 
IOW, talk is cheap. Stop talking and start showing me that you have credibility instead of questioning mine. Take your “credibilty” accusations and look in the mirror. 

P.S. BTW, is it always your way to apologize to someone for your behavior then start hurling even more insults at them?

Hmm, I had a really long post that somehow looks like it got eaten. Well, that’s okay, I probably shouldn’t have posted it anyway.

Cenocre, that last paragraph intrigued me massively, however I don’t know any of the products or methods you referenced! Could you elaborate?

I had this problem with Mike, he was annoyed at my not answering questions too — but I can’t find them! Which questions are these (sorry there’s so much copy on this comment thread!)?

“Two points in response as you missed the point. First, with Ruby, Python, etc, I AM a layman and have tried to make a decision on whether they are of use to me. The intros to all of them were so bad that I didn’t bother. The intros to javascript and PHP also sucked, but I had to persevere as I need them. Turns out both were okay and I now write hyper-simple and elegant code that I can explain to novices who catch on immediately.

Second, if someone like me (and my VERY experienced friends) with over two decades experience as a programmer of commercial software, consultant, teacher, web designer, sysop, web master, etc cannot get a decent perspective of a new programming environment in a half hour how can the less experienced do so?”

This intrigues me. Let me chuck in my disclaimer right now: I don’t have 20 years of experience in programming. I’ve barely got that many years’ experience of life. So you might want to start treating my whole stance with a pinch of salt because I don’t have the necessary overview to take the new environment of web-popularised tech within the larger context of history.

The languages I know are exclusively those you mentioned as being a layman in (except Ruby, I’ve only just had a look at it). As far as OOP is concerned, I’m no great shakes — I’ve learnt what I’ve learnt as a means towards self-sufficient web design and to be perfectly honest the times I tried to start learning C# and VB left me bored and aching. I think you’re in a similar position to Mike, he speeks of the same experience and has a similar disdain for web-based language success.

So I guess my message is thus: You pity those without 2 decades in programming, but we’re legion and we’re OK!

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To be honest, despite the unplummable iamgination and energy reserves of the independent open-source community, I’ve not seen a CSS alternative that works better yet. I’m not talking about something W3-approved, that has been corporately-endorsed, or any such thing… But surely if things were so bad someone somehwere would’ve built, just as proof of concept, their own markup styling engine?

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Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t believe simpler things exist, but the whole argument as far as I see it is one about socio-economics: Javascript and CSS have fared based on competing implementations by organisations with critical financial intent in the most public environment application ever (teh interwebs). Add to this the mix of ratification bodies struggling for impartiality as effective judges in the domain of rival interpretations by products with commercial legacies and colossal user-bases, idealism for an exponentially expanding future of the environment, and the need for backward-compatibility for the incredibly valuable internet that exists.

For those of us who grew up with this in mind, we make do with learning and hacking because we have to. You can’t fight the cybercom — our youth and relative poverty might not be such crippling disadvantages!

Wow Barney, don’t know where you got much of what your interpretations and assumptions from what I wrote, especially the pity part. Please don’t assume things about what I am saying. As you can see I can be very direct.  I do have pity - pity for all of us who have wasted massive amounts of our life on BS such a the broken IE and trying to do things on the Web that are so easy to do in the rest of our computer lives.

I don’t understand what you mean by” disdain for web-based language success”. In the web world what I disdain is unnecessary complexity in most forms, arcane, inconsistent and non-intuitive languages, bad communication (especially that which is full of assumptions) about those languages, and implementation that does not work as advertised. And I utterly detest that HTML and javascript are so tied to each other yet don’t work the same. It is abjectly stupid that you can put perfectly formatted HTML into a js variable and it will break a function. There is no rational reason for having to escape characters and remove all returns. Javascript should be able to ignore everything from the beginning to the end of a string just as HTML does with the command which I just used here to show pre.

That disdain is especially strong when considering that it doesn’t need to be this way and simplicity, versatility, ease, and power can go hand in hand. Overall, I would say that many of the basic and common tasks (that are not dependent on processing power or storage), especially relating to the everyday interface have become more difficult and take longer than they did a decade ago.

As for my last paragraph that intrigued you: “The original Macintosh was very easy to use from the first moment you sat down with it in most ways even including some programming. I work in an internal language in a database that, while far from perfect, is easy to understand and is still robust. Even the non-WYSIWYG WordStar on CP/M had very powerful keyboard commands that were very simple to learn in a few minutes if someone showed the user how intuitive the diamond pattern was.”

The original Mac brought most of the standards that have lasted and most of it was obvious. To go to something you use the “Go” menu, etc. I highly recommend studying Apple’s old HI (human interface - see I didn’t assume that everyone reading this knows what HI means) guidelines from the 80s. They spent massive amounts of time intimately studying how humans ACTUALLY work and the ADAPTED THE COMPUTER TO FIT THE PEOPLE not the other way around as we tend to do nowadays. Apple had a pretty good macro recorder from the very beginning and later on had one of the best ergonomic keyboards. Unfortunately, they have abandoned many of their great features and now have crappy keyboards.

The database I work in is Panorama. The Mac version is way ahead of the Windows version and there isn’t a Linux version, so you really have to see it on Mac to appreciate it. ( http:provue.com ) They make a generally great product some weak points in the display area such as not being able to display RTF or XML. And, their marketing is non-existent.

With WordStar you could do almost any selection from the home keys with the left hand. And, as you moved further from the center of the key pattern the commands got bigger. I don’t recall accurately but it was something like, control-d selected character-left, control-s was word left and control-A was line left. It worked similarly for moving right, up, and down. If someone SIMPLY presented it you to create a PICTURE and UNDERSTANDING of the OVERALL CONCEPT, you never needed to consult the manual as it made such obvious sense due to the ANALOGOUS ASPECT of the commands and results.

BTW - What started all of this was the whole float:center issue and you arguing about certain technical issues. How come it worked so easily and consistently with tables and the command in straight HTML if it has technical shortcomings?