Being an engineer, he discusses City Desk in the context of intrusive tools. An intrusive tool is one that you are constantly aware of using. Notepad, for example, is not an intrusive tool; it sits there and you type stuff into it. Word is very much an intrusive tool, with its pop-up advice and its real-time spelling-error-generator and its fourth-grade reading-level grammarbot. I hate Word; I use Lotus WordPro for any serious writing (my book, for example) because it's not intrusive; despite having just as many bells and whistles as Word, it does exactly what you tell it to and shuts up otherwise.

I find CSS to be an intrusive tool too, not because it beeps and squawks at you (it can't), but because as soon as you try to do anything complicated, it stops working the way it should. Setting up the three-column layout was a huge pain with Internet Explorer; I tried three different ways of doing it - all of which worked fine in Mozilla - before stumbling across something that IE accepted. I don't know if the fault is with the specification or Mozilla or IE, but CSS is clearly not ready for use when it takes trial and error, and in the end, arcane trickery, to make something that really is fairly simple, work. And I ended up with two different stylesheets anyway, and JavaScript code to select the (hopefully) right one based on what browser you are using. (Try looking at the site in both Mozilla and IE - the IE stylesheet is different because I can't be bothered keeping both versions up to date.)

For the new layout I'm considering using tables instead. HTML purists will tell you that using tables for layout is a heinous crime, but I say to the purists: Go piss up a rope.* Tables do what you tell them to, where CSS does whatever the hell it feels like. I get enough of that from people; I don't feel like dealing with it in software as well.

* Where does this expression come from, anyway?**
** Never mind, I googled.***
*** Okay, okay: GO PISS UP A ROPE by 1940s: Go away and do something characteristically stupid; ="get lost", "go fly a kite". "He asked for another contribution and I told him to go piss up a rope." (Chapman’s Dictionary of American Slang)****
**** I also found an ad for "Urine Porn". Some days you're torn between "To each his own" and "Ewwww".*****
***** I'm finished now, Tiger, you can have them back.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:28 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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