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ways I've always done things
Tuesday, December 18 2007
Though I was in my mid-to-late-20s at the time, I "grew up" on the early web, doing my first web surfing in Netscape 1.1 and writing my first HTML for Netscape 2.0. I remember how empowered I felt when I first discovered that the background colors of table cells could be set (one of the new features that came with Netscape 3). Like most people, my biases tend toward the ways I've always done things, so it took me awhile to warm to such new-fangled (and haphazardly-supported) technologies as Cascading Style Sheets and Javascript. Like most old-school web people, I prefer to lay out my formatting with tables and when I don't want to use my brain I still occasionally make use of the font tag, which (though considered deprecated) is the fastest way to set a foreground color.
Of course time has moved on, and all modern browsers support the layering of absolutely-placed divs in three dimensions, so there's no reason not to take advantage of such tricks, particularly when they greatly-simplify the HTML. The great thing about layered divs is that you can put them where you want them as you (or your code) think of them, without the planning and expansion difficulties of HTML tables. What's more, it's easy to turn a layered div on or off, making the layout more flexible and interactive. Today in my database visualization system, I placed two sets of problematic navigational links and all the feedback messages into foreground divs so they would no longer affect the basic layout of the system. It was a huge improvement. In terms of value added to the user interface, it amounted to some of the greatest return on programming investment I've ever experienced. What's more, I see the way to other interface improvements, most of which will be visually subtle but will add much to interactivity and ease-of-use.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?071218 feedback
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