Well, it’s not exactly what I’ve been asking for, but it’s actually quite a bit better than what I thought we might get. Like wanting a pony for christmas and getting a great dane.
It looks like CSS3 will have some pretty cool new attributes available for us developers. Of course, it’s all proposed and not released yet, but let’s start salivating anyway:
Not talking about MathML here, but the addition of simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division in CSS values.
By this time, I’ve worked my head around the idea that, to many developers (and clients) out there, CSS is the one true way and tables are only good for displaying data – that is, data that they consider data and not data that someone else might consider data. See my previous post on semantic html for more carping on this topic. But enough negativity – I would hereby like to add my voice to the growing number of developers calling for a new future in CSS: [paraphrase] “If CSS is the golden chalice of front-end web development, how come it can interpret between pixels, point sizes, and em sizes, but it can’t add 1 + 1?”
Now, I know, purists will say that Javascript is for math, and CSS is for styling. Just simply get a good Javascript library and do your math there. The problem is that other purists will say that using Javascript to generate your CSS positions is pure hackery. And yet other purists will say “everyone come to my website to check out my awesome CSS hacks!”
Since shortly after people started using markup to organize data, the dream has been knocked around that one day the structure and the content would become seamlessly intertwined. However, this is a tiny bit counterintuitive, as I see it, as one of the features of XML, for example, is to delineate data and content apart from the meta-data that applies to it.
The real dream has been that one day, HTML and XML would be combined (not just in terms of the XHTML standard), and that the web would turn into a big soup of meta information. This would allow all sorts of wonderfully customizable content, searching, cross-threading, and possibly, someday, even help create some kind of internet based solely on context, rather than infrastructure and IP. Positives: super-personalized web-browsing, advertisements, and content aggregation. Negatives: super-personalized web-browsing, advertisements, and content aggregation.
But I digress. The flock to div tags as cleaner and more semantically meaningful has been a beneficial one, but for we web developers who remember the [good?] [bad?] old days, there are more than a few cases in memory of the development community rushing en masse to the next greatest thing, and then flipping it into reverse with the release of the next IE browser / web standard / greatest thing.