Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | X | XML Journal

Markup is madness: the only standard that''s mandatory is TCP/IP -- that aside, may the best new standards win! (contrary opinion).

Article Excerpt
I've been reading that the first Web page went online 10 years ago. I remember what it was like being involved with software development at that time. My initial feeling was that using markup in a browser was less than optimal because it leaves too much of the presentation details up to the browser, rather than allowing developers to specify absolute coordinates and other necessary attributes for various objects on the page.

After doing much in the way of Web development and design over the past 10 years, I still agree with myself. Markup sucks for anything other than attributing style changes and links in text copy. For this purpose it's arguably easier than keeping track of style runs and keeping them in sync with text as it's being edited.

Markup is messy. It's hard to work with -- staring at it for more than a few minutes gives me a headache. Manually coming up with HTML is a tedious exercise in trying something, checking out how it looks in all of the various browsers you support, and continuing your iterations. Not all browsers speak exactly the same dialect or...