John Lindal’s Blog

HTML

August 31, 2007 on 8:51 am | In Programming | No Comments

I finally found a good analogy for describing to a programmer what a web developer does: They write assembly code.

Originally, back before CSS, it was raw hex. Once CSS was available, it was like graduating to assembly: Wow! Now I don’t have to adjust all my JMP offsets by hand every time I insert or remove an instruction! Cool!

Sounds pretty bad, right? It is

Yahoo’s new LSM guidelines, while a big improvement in the state-of-the-art, really only managed to bring some order to the chaos. It’s like having rules for when to use JMP vs. JSR.

What is really needed to take it to the next level is the ability to write semantic markup directly and then somehow compile it to raw markup/CSS which the browser can render. I say this with some confidence, because I’m working on such a beast right now…