I’m working on a webpage right now and am completely frustrated by the inability to create equal height boxes. All the existing workarounds to do so now have their limitations. For example, if you use display: table, you are limited by the fact that IE7 and below do not support it (a limitation that can be overcome) and are limited by the inability to create margins between cells. If you use border-spacing to simulate space between the cells, you get space on all sides of the cell including where you might not want it. HTML tables, as we all know, have similar shortcomings.
I looked at W3.org’s multi-column layout for CSS 3. It seems like it is intended to be used to mimic newspaper columns and not for creating equal height columns for layout.
A look at the W3.org website makes it appear as if the people behind the web standards are not very interested in hearing from the public. I wonder why…
My biggest complaint is probably the inability to create equal height boxes as far as layout goes. What standards would you people like to see? Layout, styling, effects like CSS transitions, new HTML elements, whatever. If you could change the future of web standards, what would you include?
There are moves in CSS3 for this to be easier, but we will have to wait for them to be finalized and for browsers to catch up. However, remember that content is the important thing, and these layout issues are pretty much irrelevant to site visitors anyway.
Honestly a LOT of the goofy crud like equal height columns (easily enough faked with faux columns anyways) tread into the “not viable for web deployment” nonsense – and epitomize the trend of giving the PSD jockeys who have no business doing ANYTHING Internet related too much control.
Some of the new CSS stuff regarding columns is to be frank, a convoluted unnecessary mess that’s WORSE than existing methods… while I like some of the cutesy effects like borders and shadows, much of the stuff that’s NOT deployable yet I lump in the same category as HTML 5 itself, either needlessly complex or set to throw coding practices BACK a decade or more.
Though what I’d “Like to see” is the STYLE tag obsoleted, STYLE throw a warning in the validator (of it possibly being pointless bloat/rubbish code), tightening of the structural rules BACK to what STRICT offers, elimination of pointless redundancies (see 90% of the new HTML 5 tags), and clearer definitions of the roles of the various tags in the specification. (Always struck me as funny the spec that supposedly emphasized semantic markup (4 Strict) described the purpose of tags LESS than it’s predecessor (3.2) which we badmouth for it’s presentational markup!)
Maybe add structural rules to CSS too so this illegible “stuff all attribute and value pairs all one one line” nonsense isn’t considered valid. People are too lazy or too ignorant to write good code then we need to shove it down their throat and tell them to take it like a … ok, breath… That’s what structural rules are FOR, consistency, ease of maintenance, making life easier for the next poor shlub to deal with it.
Of course such concepts appear to be the antithesis of everything HTML 5 is about… and is total gibberish to the “draw a pretty picture first” crowd.
If it’s relevant to the webmaster, it’s relevant to those who view his or her webpage. Content has to be organized and it is helpful if it looks decent. Not everyone wants a site that looks like Craigslist.
Heh heh, I knew you probably wouldn’t like that comment. But I do find designers and site owners can get tied up in knots over layout issues that really are not worth the trouble from a business/site visitor point of view. I’m constantly fighting with designers over what’s practical on the web. Personally, I feel that the CSS currently available for styling web pages is more than enough to create attractive, usable and workable designs—but you can’t tell that to people who have grown up with Photoshop and the like who have gotten used to a lot more options.
I agree with ralph and DS. I’m trying to ween the company I work at off of PSD comps and into a method where the developers work with the designers to find something easy to code yet very attractive (I’m tired of using the ruler tool to measure every little thing =p).
I also agree with DS that I would like to see some of the extra tags go away. Though I wouldn’t go quite as far as DS.
I am kind of mixed on the grid layout issue. On the one hand, I can see some serious value. Web applications (not websites) could have some very serious uses. For example, I’m working on a back-end system which is essentially a variety of different sized boxes that can more or less be rearranged. These would benefit from having a grid layout (though since it requires JS, I can use that to do the same thing). On the other hand… what DS said. =p
