Daily misery

This is part of the xhtml source code for the newly launched www.onoff.se, a Swedish consumer electronic chains who recently ran a full-page ads in national newspapers promoting their new site and how it is ‘mostly adapted accessibility-wise for customers with disabilities, e.g. visual or hearing impairments’. Via [Roger Johansson]

Over the last few years, the general web community has started to embrace the css/xhtml paradigm, distancing themselves from table-based markup in the process. This is a good thing, hell it’s a great thing. Many web developers do so mainly because it is just so much easier and common sense. Having the power to control almost the entire layout from a single css file and apply changes to multiple pages with a single line of code.

Few of us convert because it’s important to separate presentation and content, utilizing semantic markups or that we’re concern about the accessibility and usability issues. People just like to do thing the easier way and happy to say that, css/xhtml is the choice of doing it the ‘easy way’.

Hence the ‘divitis’ syndrome. ‘Every ‘td’ cells represent a div’ thinking brings us the wonderful codes shown in the above picture. In fact, you can even use the ’save for web’ option in Adobe’s Illustrator to transform design mockup to css/xhtml markup! Sweet lovely mother of all Gods. It’s like back in 1995, only 10 times better because now you’re embracing the ’standards’.

That, coupled with the explosion of AJAX (everyone should put onclick, onmouseover events on your ‘a’, ‘div’ and ‘p’ tags! Woot!) make our source code looks fat, ugly and stupid. Not only we have an explosion of ‘div’ tags, but now the endemic has spread with the inclusion of new variants - the overusage of classes and IDes. All because we, as web designers and developers and information architecturist, want to control everything. It’s an irony, considering that the main reason why we were in the ‘table mess’ during the early web years is because designers and developers wanted to control the web and back then the web wasn’t maturing at a pace fast enough to support their ‘creativity’ (or maybe they didn’t know the difference between print and web design) that the only viable solution was to use the table markup.

If the current loading time of Yahoo! Mail beta or having to insert 10 external javascript links in between xhtml ‘head’ tags is what I have to endure/do in order to fully enjoy that ‘rich user experience’, then thanks but no thanks. I want my html 4.0x back.

It’s like taking a huge step forward only to take another two giant steps backwards. *sigh*