Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Of Bug Fixes and Structural Markup

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.

This item was posted by Dan Rubin on Thursday, June 12th, 2003.

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• Internet

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