My Web Rant

Some things about the current state of Web design (and I mean static XHTML/CSS design) really bother me.

To: Web Browser Authors

Dear Web Browser Authors,

Let's talk about some things you're not doing right.

You don't implement font sizes consistently. If I say that I want a small font, I should get pretty close to the same point size if the user has their fonts set on the default zoom level, regardless of which browser I'm in. On this very site, Internet Explorer users are seeing bigger fonts for many design elements than Netscape/Mozilla users. Why? Because they can't agree on what small or large or xx-large is, or what the default font size should be called. I could always use absolute points, pixels, or ems to specify my font sizes -- but that would prevent users of most browsers from "zooming" the text, because you break the text-zoom feature when I try to specify my font size more precisely. Why?
Your standards support is buggy. When I make ugly table kludges, they work smoothly, but when I try to support standards by writing good code, I find that your browsers don't support all the standards yet, or don't implement them cleanly. It's really annoying.
You make creating clean, table-free layouts impossible. Your browsers implement tables cleanly and pretty much the same way, but differ wildly on their interpretations of standards like CSS2. This means that if I want to make a Web site everyone can enjoy, it's tough to do it in a table-free manner.

Dear Web Standards Zealots,

Thought you'd get off the hook, didn't you? Let's talk about some things you're not doing right.

You make it a royal pain to embed scripts and style sheets in pages. Look -- just look at the obnoxiously complicated code I have to insert just to use a <script> segment in my <head> tag in an XHTML-compliant way:
```
<script type="text/javascript"><![CDATA[//><!]]></script>
```
Is that really necessary? Aren't all these standards designed by the same group? Shouldn't they interact cleanly?
Your insistence that tables not be used for layout (ever) is not reasonable. I've tried several times to create table-free layouts, and it's possible in some situations -- but thanks to your friends the Web browser authors, getting CSS and <div> tags to do what tables did before just isn't possible without lots of headaches and more than a few workarounds that are greater sins than just using tables in the first place.

random