HTML Sucks for Rich Web Applications
This post started out as a reply to a work colleague’s article - Ben Teese’s CSS Layout Sucks for Panel-Based Web Apps- but it eventually expanded out into such a large little rant that I thought it would be better suited to my blog. So here it is.
Trying to Make CSS Suck Less
Ben, since I come from a web development background … I hear ya. At my last job, XHTML and CSS were our primary building blocks for web sites and applications. By the end of my time there, we got pretty good at building CSS layouts - but there was always some little exception, some little element that didn’t *quite* look right due to some weird CSS nuance. Worse, client change requests could often be downright painful for exactly the reasons you mention: recalculating measurements, layout “knowledge” scattered throughout the stylesheet(s), etc. Worse, trying to make it work in every version of Firefox, IE, Safari and Opera? No deal. Not without many, many painful hacks. Despite being a standard for *years*, most vendors’ implementations of CSS are half-assed at best and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
Regarding the DRY problems mentioned with CSS: a half-baked idea of mine was to use $TEMPLATE_LANGUAGE to generate CSS files as part of the build process to alleviate some of the pain. I never actually got around to this myself, but others seem to be scared of this approach. Why? If your template engine provides you with variables, conditionals, loops and a means for performing calculations in your CSS templates why aren’t you generating your CSS using Velocity, Erb or even PHP!?
HTML and Rich UI Don’t Mix
All gripes aside, when it comes to the web I remain a somewhat stalwart supporter of CSS and XHTML - if only because tables clutter up HTML like a dog. However, I do think that the HTML hemisphere of the web world is starved for choice: both tables and CSS suck in their own hairy little warty ways. Tables suck because they’re awful to maintain and effectively render screen-readers useless. CSS sucks because it’s error-prone and void of expressive syntax & semantics.
The web world should be paying a lot of attention to rich client solutions such as Flex and Silverlight. Flex would be my first choice for a client platform if I had to start building a web application tomorrow. In fact, I’d go so far as to argue that the decision between CSS/tables for web applications is moot - the real problem is the current trend of using HTML as a medium for rich web applications. GWT is a perfect example of the ridiculous lengths we’re going to in order to just make things work. It’s a godawful hack around a limited technology.
If your requirements permit it, don’t try to make your HTML jump through hoops - opt for Flex or Silverlight instead if you plan on having a truly interactive UI. If you’re stuck with HTML, inexpressive CSS stylesheets can be augmented with a template language to reduce the amount of knowledge being spread throughout your code.