Hahha! Its all correct!

Yep, that's all pretty much on the money.

It's the simple what to do's really. And well worthy of a novice website coder to use.

But man, I have to say, sometimes it's just SO MUCH easier to use tables than divs.

Sure you can do all sorts of great styling things with divs, but it can be HELL to get it to look right on Firefox and IE and all others...

Still, for GREAT examples of how the same html can look wildly different by just changing the style sheet attached to it, check out The CSS Zen Garden a site that made me see the real value in css... completely change your site look and layout with only changing ONE FILE... great stuff, just hard to always get to work.

I thought websites were a level 5 magic spell cast into existence by wizards.

Website production != coding.
Anyone who claims it is, hasnt touched a real programming language in their lives.

^ Building a garden shed may not be as difficult as building a skyscraper, but it's still building something.

I downvoted your comment because it comes off as incredibly snide and rude, with an aftertaste of holier-than-thou.

gunrock - the difference between producing a website and software engineering is like the difference between choosing and screwing in the light bulbs in your house versus actually wiring your house for electricity. Both activities are necessary, but equating one with the other is absurd.

Of course, website integration with backend dbs has become complex enough that it basically does involve real coding. That's a whole other story though, and not really touched upon in this silly rap.

I feel so dirty voting up rap.

Not bad.

Charliem and jonny -- ouch, take it easy. I know what you're saying, though -- as a matter of preference and professional humility, I think "coding" is appropriate for web production, because that's what it is: you're encoding content for presentation by marking it up in HTML and CSS. I generally reserve the term "programming" for real software development, and I use "scripting" for javascript and PHP/mySQL stuff. I agree that serious web app development is another animal that should really be considered full blown software.

Most of it is correct, although I have a slight disagreement with the "bold is old and wrong" statement. <em> and <strong> are designed to be semantic tags that happen to render the same as <b> and <i>. I know it's a bit nit-picky but you don't always want to "emphasize" text, (e.g. the title of a book). My rule of thumb is, think about how people would read the text aloud, if you would actually emphasize it (or strongly say it), use <em> and <strong>, otherwise <b> and <i> are still cool.

>> ^spoco2:
Sure you can do all sorts of great styling things with divs, but it can be HELL to get it to look right on Firefox and IE and all others...

might I suggest that

* {
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
}

at the top of the CSS solves most of these problems.

The render engines are slightly different, but the main cause of problems is that the default CSS files for browsers are different. Reset everything to 0px, and define it yourself, and always use numbers in px or em. "border: thin" means different things in different browsers, but "border: 2px" is consistant.

>> ^charliem:


HTML is code, it's markup, it's not programming, but it's enCODEd. I code HTML/CSS with vi , FF and gray-matter-pro, my partner is a graphic designer who uses dream-weaver to design web pages, I code, she does not.

Personally, front-end design/coding is okay, but to me it's more just a major inconvenience. I'd rather leave it to people who know it inside-out and love it even for its faults. My only love is for "real" programming.

@dgandhi: If only it were that simple.

(P.S. Yay! Programming talk! )

Doesn't have nearly enough vulgar language and misogynistic comments to be taken seriously.

Does OK as a rap song though...

>> ^lucky760:
@dgandhi: If only it were that simple.

I do it all the time. If you are going to attempt to support IE<6 then it's a lost cause without heavy DOM intervention ( and for < 1% browser share?), but post 6 using strict doctype, and zeroing out the CSS as I suggest, leaves very few consistency glitches.

If you are arguing instead that CSS is complicated, irrespective of consistency, well I would have to acknowledge that, but so is programming, though CSS lacks interesting-hard problems and has lots of annoying-hard problems. It's not my favorite activity either, but it's better then spending a few hours every week writing sed scripts(or doing it manually *shiver*) to modify a whole sites DOM without trashing things in the process, when all I want to do is make some object a little wider.

"Website production != coding.

Anyone who claims it is, hasnt touched a real programming language in their lives."


here let me fix that for you

"building flat html != coding.

Anyone who claims it is, hasnt touched a real programming language in their lives."

Most websites today require database access, ui design, a ton of compatibility testing, and optimization if you are lucky enough to have an audience. If usability, db access, and optimization isn't programming than I don't know what is.

oooh also css sites I've built in the last 6 months. Down with tables.

www.brainstormdesign.net
www.bridgerun.com
www.hightowerboatworks.com
www.lowndesgrove.com
www.marshlandcommunities.com
www.mattressdirectonline.com

some of the content is still table based, but that has more to do with legacy application output than the actual template.

Getting CSS pixel perfect across browsers is a real bitch

Right, fair enough.
I guess blanket statements about implimentations of specific languages all under the cover of "website design" not being true code, is ineed a tad harsh.

Hand written ASP/SQL etc. are a form of coding, indeed. Writing it with the aid of say...dreamweaver, not coding.

Just a thing that gets on my nerves when people who toy around with a neat little publishing software think they are coding, when they probably havnt even seen the code that they are publishing with.

Makes me sad panda.

nice dance at the end, yum i want a snickers now

Yeah, i work in a production house where i am the only individual who rocks ssh like it's going out of style. Dreamweaver is the main app, such is life.

if you see MM_swap in a js script you can basically assume the code was generated by Dreamweaver. It's everywhere and replaces a really easy hover function that can be managed in css with tag:hover, although in practice ie6 only supports a:hover so you are better off setting a:hover to display:inline; and specifying a width and height and using the background: url(some file); to describe the dimensions of whatever item you wanted a mouse over effect on.