1. Surely this isn't entirely a problem of the standards bodies. The W3C has put the standards out there, and they should work. The problem is in the implementation and interpretation of those standards. Consider the standards as a contract, even with a contract people will argue that their interpretation is correct, although, in this case, I think we all know where most of the blame lies...

Posted at 7:07PM on Jul 17th 2006 by Si

2. Exactly! I typically hate John's writing, but I posted on my personal blog about this exact topic a little while ago too.

Standards are a great ideal to shoot for, but how long has CSS been around? How many camps are rendering code differently? What use is any of this if the Mozilla team and the WebKit team and the Opera team and the IE team aren't sitting down and banging all this stuff out together?

Standards aren't 'standards' because they aren't standard. I don't have to take my Toyota to a Shell station while you have to take your Honda to Conocos. I shouldn't have to worry about whether a site is going to break in this browser or that.

Posted at 8:06PM on Jul 17th 2006 by David Chartier

3. I wrote a blog in response. You can click my name to read it.

If you don't want to, I'll give a summary:

John C. Dvorak is not a designer. He's tech columnist (that likes to troll a lot). The fact that he can't get his head around CSS has no bearing on whether CSS is worthwhile. The fact that many great designers successfully execute CSS-based designs says far more.

Secondly, John C. Dvorak lashes out at everyone EXCEPT the programmers that write the rendering engines. It's not CSS's fault that IE can't render it properly. It's not the W3C's fault. It's the guys that wrote IE.

Finally, his suggesting that no one is doing anything about the inconsistencies in rendering is bunk. The Web Standards Project has long been pressuring browser makers into supporting standards. IE7 is being worked on as we speak. The IE7 team has listened to public outcry and is making a more standards compliant browser. I didn't mention in my article because most of my readers are probably aware that FireFox, Safari, and Opera (I think) have made versions of their browsers that pass the Acid 2 test. That means that every major graphical browser are, at least, trying hard to be standards compliant.

Just because John had a hard time redesigning his site doesn't mean the web is in shambles. But, I think, for once he wasn't just trolling. He was actually frustrated. However, I don't get freaked out when a newbie designer complains that he can't get some CSS to work. So, people shouldn't get freaked out about this.

Posted at 9:25PM on Jul 17th 2006 by Robert Brodrecht

4. There's actually no more work being done on IE7's display code. It was "layout complete" in March, and MS's roadmap has no further development for it in store. Evidenced in Beta 3, which has no CSS additions or corrections from prior betas. A shame, too, because this is their chance to jump in with some truly advanced, accurate CSS rendering, including CSS3.

The biggest problem i see with the standards is not the standards themselves, nor even the interpretation. W3C is very specific about how it should be. But when IE coders decide for themselves that, "No, it would look better THIS way," the rift is widened. Opera and Firefox have done well to stick to the specifications (not interpretations).

Dvorak#Ass > Dvorak#Head {position: absolute;} (note that Head is a child of Ass, therefore inside it. Ugh, i've been doing this too long.)

Posted at 10:37PM on Jul 17th 2006 by Joe T

5. OOO I like your insult in the form of CSS.

Posted at 10:43PM on Jul 17th 2006 by Russell Heimlich

6. I look forward to the day when everyone will ignore the tripe that comes out of Dvorak's mouth.

Posted at 11:05PM on Jul 17th 2006 by James Sumners

7. 6: Typically, often times, Dvorak writes shock stuff just to get people's panties in a bunch; google for this and check YouTube, he's even on-camera admitting this. You can think of him as the Howard Stern of the tech industry, except that every now and then, like in this case, he actually writes something that makes sense.

Think about it: a standard means that it would work everywhere, like the analogy I used earlier: you can put Shell gas in a Honda, or a Chevy, or a Subaru or a Ford, and it'll work just fine. You toss the same exact CSS into IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera and countless other browsers, and you could very well get a headache from trying to figure out whether you're looking at the same website between all those browsers.

Dvorak's got a point: standards can't simply assume the name until they're actually standard. Being that web designers have to constantly tweak and double-check and re-format and re-learn and add compromises and extra check code and god knows what else into the sites they build means that the system isn't working - at least not yet.

Posted at 11:22PM on Jul 17th 2006 by David Chartier

8. CSS isn't even technically a standard. It's a specification - a recommendation of specified methods for browsers to render visual layout using assigned properties and values. i misspoke myself previously to imply CSS as a standard. i was jumping in with the in-use terminology. The specification of W3C is detailed and, when implemented correctly, it's constructive. However, as has happened with HTML since the 90s, browser coders are prone and able to implement their own offshoots. IE's colorable scrollbars, Netscape's dread LAYER tag, whatever they feel is necessary to meet the needs of their audience or to suggest enhancements to the technology. That's why there are "-moz" prefixed CSS rules that only work in Mozilla browsers, and calculation rules that only work in IE. But the basic point is, if you stick to the specification when designing a browser, it should look the same as any other browser. It's not a standard, because no browser is required to follow it to be considered a web browser. Think of IE as the two-cycle engine of web browsers. You CAN put straight gasoline in it, but would you?

Posted at 6:58AM on Jul 18th 2006 by Joe T

9. Dvorak rhymes with "IE Border Hack", so it's obvious is is overcompensating for an underinflated ego.

Posted at 8:55AM on Jul 18th 2006 by will

10. Invalid HTML and CSS make debugging a chore, sometimes impossible. What odds do you give that Dvorak has nice clean code to work with?

I didn’t think so.

Posted at 1:12AM on Jul 19th 2006 by Joe Clark

11. The new Internet Explorer 7 handle the css attributes like firefox or opera (9). The new webbrowser are much better then the older. I dont have problems now, to handle it right.

Posted at 2:24AM on Jul 20th 2006 by OMG

12. And here is what Eric Meyer has to say about Dvorak's screed: http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/07/26/dvoraked/

Posted at 1:36PM on Jul 26th 2006 by Amber Rhea

13. I think that the new IE7 is moving towards rendering code more like firefox. Although it's not perfect, at least it has hover divs. But I think IE7 isn't as good for Search engine optimization as mozilla because of the extensions firefox already has.

thanks,
Brad Henry
http://www.seoslap.com

Posted at 12:26PM on Oct 10th 2006 by Brad Henry