I’m really pissed off with the CSS fanboys let me tell you. Their devotion to CSS-P is so religious that their collective argument sounds annoyingly rhetorical at best.
Is there such thing as pragmatism?? I’m aware that pragmatism isn’t always the desired way to build software and systems. Heck, If I’m building a software to control nuclear reactors, I would be scared to let my pragmatism rule the software design, I can’t risk blowing a whole city or country and I’d have to take utmost care in every step I take to ensure I follow proper protocols and procedures so I don’t fry a city or entire country accidentally.

But lets face it, designing a website is not the same as designing a nuclear reactor control system.
And as such I can afford to say screw semantics, screw standards, screw them all if they screw up my time and resources and force me to think less of design and shitload more of hacks to just get things right.
I don’t care to get things just right. I want things to be damn right to start with. And if semantically incorrect methods permit me to do so, so be it.

I was just wondering, if HTML table was repackaged with absolutely no changes to any of its markup structure and behavior and called grid and renamed tr,td,th too, would all the CSS-P fanboys use it??

    <grid>
    <row>
   < unit> "Grid Glory"
   < /unit>
   < /row">
   < /grid>

To me its utter nonsense to not use a feature just because of semantic concerns and feeble arguments of SEO, accessibility etc.

The thing that really pisses me off though is the fact that as soon as someone raises concern about CSS/DIV based designs, all the CSS fanboys gang up and point their fingers and tell people that the reason they have problem with CSS/DIV based layout is because they are just plain ass dumb.

These bright new fanboys are pretty fanatic and everywhere I read, their arguments are just the same. Standard arguments, boxed arguments.

And they talk about the amount of code in the markup that makes table-based layout horrible to maintain not to mention the bandwidth penalty.

As if the amount of css hack that has to be conjured to do simple layouts doesn’t need maintenance and as if it loads by magic on the browser and bandwidth issue becomes non-issue….

CSS /DIV based layout is counter-intuitive to say the least. Who starts thinking in terms of float and clear when designing anyway??
If I want to add a new element to the a layout, I not only have to think about the size of the element but I have to make damn sure that the rest of the page doesn’t break by a mere addition of an element in a page. Which forces me to look at the whole design in terms of pixels, margins and paddings to add be able to add
a new element to a layout item. And that doesn’t prevent content/elements bleeding off the layout container.

And how about overlap problems??
I can break the best laid out CSS site by merely adding one more element to it……

CSS has merely opened a new job market and allowed people to make loads of money out of it. And the fanboys of CSS/DIV layout guard their self-interest with great zealot because without CSS they will be out of jobs. I mean, who’s going to write a page full of CSS hack to give us merely a 3-column fluid layout with column-size constraints. And then they write one more page full of CSS hacks to prevent the content from bleeding out of their containers, with partial success.

Web-development has taken a great leap backward as a result of the push to use CSS/DIV/SPAN for layouts.
Because we spend most of the time not in designing pages but in applying hacks to make them look devent on most browsers.

If the fanboys close their eyes for one minute and forget everything bad that had been hammered into their head about tables and think of it as a grid, u’ll be damn surprised how intuitive it is to design in terms of grids. All decent desktop GUI toolkit provide grid-based layout which allows us to apply constraint to layout grid-elements in relation to other grid elements and so on.

Why?

The fanboys might argue that the GUI toolkit designers were mere dumb people who still hold on to the grid-based layout of last century and blah blab and some more blah.

And when the fanboys run out of ammunition, they fallback to blaming browsers and declare its the fault of browsers and nothing else.
And meanwhile they bleed to death trying to make a simple layout work in most browsers with tons of css hacks which still doesn’t quite do the job. why?

CSS is ill-equipped to handle layouts…..The language or pseudo-language of CSS was designed by people who have no knack for Designs, if they did, the language would have been more intuitive than this terrible piece of work. I come from a programming background and I love beautiful designs and I like to pretend I can create cool designs and sites. For me CSS/DIV layout makes no sense from either a programmer’s prespective or a designer’s.

From a programmer’s perspective I like parameter driven development to simplify things, and from a designers perspective, I’d hate to have to hand-code the whole friggin page design and have to come up with countless hacks to overcome both CSS and browser shortcomings.

CSS sucks so bad that even though billions of people use the internet everyday, yet no decent visual designing tool has come out so far. The one decent WYSWYG editor Dreamweaver fails miserably when designing layouts in CSS.
Where’s the forward mobility promised by this new technology??