In My Experience: “I still use html tables”:
"Fully abstracting your UI from its content takes skill and time. If you don't follow thru, you can negate much of the benefit you seek to create. Now stop and think. Do you even know what the benefit is that you are attempting to create? Will that value be worth the effort?"
Mark Pilgrim: “Semantic obsolescence”:
"I bought into every argument the W3C made that keeping up with standards, validating, and using semantic markup now would somehow 'future-proof' my site and provide some mystical 'forward compatibility'. How about some fucking payoff now? How about some fucking compatibility?"
There are some good points in both of these. Like many things, there is the “right way” to do something, the way that makes you smile and feel good inside when you leave work, and there is the way that actually works and allows you to implement a solution quickly and move on to what is really important (adding content to a site, improving application features, etc). I tried an all-CSS layout for an Intranet project many years ago where the browser version could be mandated. Sure, that was before Mozilla was done, but even so it’s not an experience I’d like to return to any time soon, just for the sake of doing things the “right way”. There has to be a real need, and that differs from project to project.
