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The question on the table

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The question on the table

: Are tables really evil? Well, no they’re not. But they were never intended to be used to format web pages, and so now that there’s a better solution (CSS), they should no longer be used that way. Tables are still completely viable in HTML – but for displaying tabular data.

Why? Why, really, should anyone change? The best answer is this: for the same reason Userland developed Radio. Radio solves (as do other systems) a big problem: separating content from style. Trouble is, there are three variables, not just two.

Content – we know about that. Style – we know about that too. But there’s also structure to consider. Using CSS allows us to separate structure from style. This is as powerful, in its own way, as separating content from style, and just as important.

By using CSS to format my pages (though I do have one table still kicking around, unfortunately), I get to present items that any device can understand. If some bit of text is a very important heading on the page, I don’t obscure the fact by coding it with font tags and hiding it in a table that’s purely there to place it in a prominent position on the page. I call it what it is: h1. Simple, clean.

Most importantly, though, suddenly it no longer matters what device is trying to “display” or render my page. Anything at all will see that and display that bit of text as the most important thing on that page.

Why is that important? Well, because as Dave Winer says, the web should be a great writing environment – which implies that it should equally be a great reading environment. When I’m writing, I’m only concerned about me – my ability to write well and have it appear. To make it a great reading environment – and thus support the other side of the coin – I can’t just care about me, I have to care about everyone else as well. And the fewer assumptions I make about them the better. Who am I to insist that they use a certain device to look at my page? They read, their choice. Why should I make them track down an alternate version which may or may not work on their particular device?

If you want the web to be a great writing environment, you also want it to be a great reading environment. And that means using CSS to provide the style, HTML (or XHTML) deployed in templates to provide the structure, and a CMS to feed the content. It’s quite simple, actually.

Well the Moose

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is quick, that’s for certain. He’s already replied to my little missive and explains things a little more. And what he describes would drive me completely bonkers – in fact, it has done so many times in the past. I have a thing against all shadowy priesthoods, and the workflow priesthood in a web environment is one of the most frustrating things around.

It reminds me of the dark ages in Europe, where they developed this incredibly complicated system of monasteries and the whole Church structure surrounding, essentially, one issue: how to keep Aristotle hidden. OK, there was more to it than that – but make no mistake, keeping Aristotle unknown was a major driving force behind the European power structure for hundreds of years.

And then, of course, St. Thomas (you may know him as Aquinas – and there were others too all over Europe) let the cat out of the bag, leading (though not directly) very quickly to Luther and Calvin and the rest is literally history.

Point being that any priesthood, any dogmatic, centralized control of knowledge or process that goes beyond what’s very strictly necessary is a dangerous thing. It’s inefficient, and limits good people from doing interesting work. In that, TM, I think we are in agreement.

On a lighter note

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:
[localhost:~] myusername% uptime
3:33PM up 4 days, 20:29, 1 user, load averages: 0.95, 0.94, 0.83
That includes running the classic environment (through OS X) and just doing stuff without stressing too much about anything. Just plugging away.

Wired News

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published an interesting update on Minitel today. It’s interesting to note that as the internet moves from the desktop to other devices (in addition to the desktop, this ain’t no zero-sum game), these other environments (phones, PDAs, etc.) are quite similar to what minitel has always offered. Hmmm. Back to the future indeed.

It’s pretty boring of me

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to link to a Feed article – I do it all the time – but that’s only because, to me, it is the most interesting magazine going, in any medium. Anyhow, tonight’s object of my attention is the excellent, refreshing article, This Is Planet Earth. Mitchell Stephens has begun a long journey to report on the state of globalization around the world.

His first stop was to meet with the inestimable Clifford Geertz and his second, Wichita KS, where he found Laotion food among other things.

It’s personally interesting to me to read that because it mirrors my own experience in a way. In the early 90s I had this insane job in which I travelled to every city in Canada (pretty much). In my travels I was shocked, quite literally, to find a completely legitimate Thai restaurant in Prince Albert SK, to meet Indian (i.e., from India) businessmen (they were invariably men) in all sorts of cities, no matter how small and remote, and generally put the lie to the standard Canadian dogma: immigrants live in the big cities (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, etc.) and the rest is still very white and protestant. In my experience 10 years ago, that is simply not true.

I grew up at University in an environment in which very different issues were at the front of everyone’s mind – a very similar world as was described by Naomi Klein in No Logo (in fact if I’m not mistaken we overlapped at McGill). But I studied political theory, so even then the idea of globalization was kicking around – but at that time the whole edifice relied (at least casually) on the bedrock principle that cities=diversity, towns=whitebread. In Canada that’s an even deeper idea that permeates our entire canon of literature until 1990 or so. And it was, and is, wrong.

All this by way of saying that this sort of fresh, novel approach to the question of globalization is long overdue.

Michael Boyle Blog