Of Bug Fixes and Structural Markup
posted 6 years, 9 months ago // 6 comments // comments are closed
In today’s Daily Report, Zeldman had this to say about my bug fix:
“Dan’s solution is simple and it works. But it also wastes bandwidth on nonsemantic tags to force a display issue in an uncooperative browser. This is the very problem designing with standards is supposed to solve. It’s not our goal to find fault, but to point out how pervasive old school methods are, even among forward-thinking developers. While we greatly appreciate Dan’s help, the Hypocrisy Police would toss us in the hoosegow if we used this method on a site for a book that recommends using clean, structural markup.”
Well, since I’m also “Never one to sit on his hands when there is a problem to be solved,” I must take this as a challenge, and create not only a standards-compliant fix, worthy of inclusion in the inner workings of Zeldman’s DWWS site, but to prove that I am not simply a problem solving machine, operating sans-thought and reason. No, my goal in life is to create structural markup, with all design controlled by CSS, and damnit, I’m not going to let the record show anything to the contrary!
Watch this space for my final solution.
UPDATE: Well, as luck would have it, someone else found the solution before I did. By replacing display:inline with display:block and float:left on the li elements, Alexander Hill solved Zeldman’s problem without using any non-semantic markup, and it works in all major browsers. C’est la vie.
“final solution” has some bad connotations, fyi…
It was only meant to imply finality, as in “I will make sure this next solution to the problem is the last one needed.”
I’m interested to know what you inferred from it though :-)
you’ve never heard the term “final solution” applied in the context of the holocaust?
Yeah but i am sure Dan didnt mean that or implied that.
i’m sure he didn’t also. oddly enough, it’s the first thing that came to my mind when reading the words. maybe i’m just weird.
yeah, funnily enough, thats what came to mind as well at first but then I realized from the context. i think it is a good thing that it is so, for forgetting compleetly abt holocaust with be a folly. a reminder from time to time serves us well..