Simon Willison’s Weblog

wow. I was worried, but had my fingers crossed for the best. That didn't work.

seth - 8th March 2004 21:12 - #

As I mentioned on my site (just today as a matter of fact) this is obviously part of some elaborate April Fool's Joke they're pulling on us. It's the only reasonable explanation...

pete - 8th March 2004 21:12 - #

Worst decision ever. "Welcome back to 1996." pretty much nails it, yes.

Carlo Zottmann - 8th March 2004 21:17 - #

Wow.

I almost expect to see a frontpage meta tag in the source code.

I especially like the move from fixed to fluid width when going from the homepage to content pages.

sad.

indeed...very sad.

Jeremy Flint - 8th March 2004 21:38 - #

I am subscribing from all lockergnome RSS feeds as we speak.

Thijs van der Vossen - 8th March 2004 22:10 - #

_Un_subscribing. Sorry.

Thijs van der Vossen - 8th March 2004 22:11 - #

Oh, the irony: "Fear Of Valid Markup" was published by Lockergnome on the 3rd, telling us all how to write valid (X)HTML.

Andrew Sidwell - 8th March 2004 22:46 - #

I agree that if they don't admit to this being some kind of sick joke they could quite possibly start going down the drain only because of the negative press the geek blogs will hand down upon them.

It is one thing to do a tabled based design that would have major problems doing in CSS, but to go back to something so plan and use tables on top of it is inexplicable.

Scrivs - 8th March 2004 22:56 - #

Maybe it's a clever ploy to gain PR by getting geek blogs all over the world to link to them. Sure, the link text will be stuff like 'joke?' and 'sad excuse' and 'Hello Netscape Gold' but they will totally own those terms in Google ;)

Alexw - 9th March 2004 00:38 - #

That is sad. I thought the css design was nice and I'm sure that most visitors would have a fairly recent browser so backwards compatibility shouldn't have been a huge issue.

scott - 9th March 2004 02:13 - #

I couldn't figure out if your weblog has trackback or not—there's a "Pingbacks (0)" on the front page that indicates that it does, but no auto-discoverable trackback URL, and when I tried to submit one to http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2004/03/08/devolu tion it didn't seem to add anything. Anyways, I just mentioned Lockergnome's folly on my blog and referenced your post, so I thought I'd just give a friendly heads-up.

qid - 9th March 2004 06:30 - #

Maybe the truth of the matter is, the web developer who made the site no longer works / associates with the current team, and noone knew how to make changes to the black-voodoo that is a css styled layout, not even the new 'developer'.

It's really bizarre that they didn't go for the transitional layout, as I've found it's an extremely quick way for 'table-designers' to work and learn css.

Andrew - 9th March 2004 08:14 - #

I think I'm going to cry. Anybody have the CSS version cached? It'd be nice to have it (or even screenshots of it) posted somewhere, as a memorial.

Ruth - 9th March 2004 08:36 - #

"Fear Of Valid Markup", shouldn't it be now rephrased as: "Lockergnome: Fear Of Semantic Markup" in either case I cannot say the XHTML tutorial was exactly accurate either.

Robert Wellock - 9th March 2004 10:12 - #

Robert, considering they've chosen to abandon the only good thing the site had going for it, maybe they should not bother with renaming one article and give the whole site a catchy new title instead...

“Lockergnome: waving subscribers goodbye since March 2004” ought to do it

Joshua - 9th March 2004 10:51 - #

Wow! it hurts to see such 'code'.

Mathieu 'P01' HENRI - 9th March 2004 13:27 - #

It's awful markup.

However, I'm currently working on a CSS/XHTML Strict site, and having spent the last week trying to get any kind of consistency between browsers, I can see why it's happening.

Using CSS has added two weeks (at least) to our development time; I could have done the same thing with tables in hours as opposed to days.

I know it's not what they're meant for; I know about the reasons for using XHTML/CSS, but the fact remains, every standards-compliant site I develop turns into an epic battle against browser bugs, inconsistent support for styles and inexplicable weirdness which I sometimes never find an answer to.

So yes, it's crap. But unless something major happens soon, I can see a lot more developers starting to do this.

Mark Bell - 9th March 2004 13:52 - #

I'm amazed how a technology promoting newsletter goes back to a design (worse then the original) and considers it a upgrade. It's only been a few months since they did all that work on the previous layout.

They could have dropped the extreme CSS and went with something less dramatic but still maintained a nice clean layout. I hope the Gnomedex and RSS sites are not to follow. Even the File of the Day layout isn't that bad.

There are still a few pages not yet changed for those asking to see the previous: http://lockergnome.com/channels/manage.phtml

Stephen - 9th March 2004 15:12 - #

The worst part is, they couldn't even get HTML 4.01 transitional right -- 47 validation errors, even after manually specifying a character encoding...

Patrick - 9th March 2004 15:42 - #

Mark Bell, it's simply a matter of experience. I grew up doing this CSS stuff, and 'getting out' a design, ususally takes me anywhere from a few hours to about two days tops. Now I'm usually not doing anything extremely cutting edge, but then, most people aren't.

Ask me to do a table layou, though, and it'd easily take me two weeks. I don't even grasp the basics of how to produce a table based layout, and I consider that to be a good thing.

Lach - 10th March 2004 00:34 - #

If you read the Web Developer newsletter you will see they are working on a new better CSS design.

Steven - 10th March 2004 02:31 - #

Hi Lach,

Yes, I agree; it's down to what you're used to.

However, I've been working in XHTML/CSS for almost two years now (professional web development for nearly five), so I'm fairly sure it's not just that I don't have enough experience.

Your web site, for example. Coded very well and adhering to current web standards, yet it causes a horizontal scrollbar to appear when viewed in IE (probably due to IE's differing box model interpretation).

It's little things like this which slowly mount up during the development of a site, and this is why I generally spend a lot longer on XHTML/CSS sites.

I'm not recommending we all go back to using tables for layout; far from it.

What I am saying is that we shouldn't be surprised to see some developers electing not to build standards-compliant sites for a while yet, simply due to the time and cost involved in making them work across current browsers.

When everyone on the net is using Mozilla Firefox I'll be a happy geek... ;)

Mark Bell - 10th March 2004 09:41 - #

Mark, I too have recently (in the last year) moved from table based to CSS based design methods. Sometimes it takes longer, sometimes it doesn't. It usually depends on what kind of problems I run into with CSS and the different browsers/platforms.

There is always a learning curve when picking up something new, whether its moving to CSS or learning to ride a bike. The more you use it and learn what causes various bugs in certain browsers, you learn to either design around those bugs or hack them.

At first, it did take longer to do CSS design, but now I can do it in the same amount of time.

One could argue that you could take just as long to create a table based layout. Writing the code, applying all the font tags, making sure they are all closed properly, valign=top, cellpadding=2, etc.

The real benefit for me in using CSS is that when we are in active development, if a client wants to see the elements of the page arranged a little differently, I don't have to completely re-code a table. I just make a copy of my CSS file, make the appropriate changes, and *maybe* have to do a small bit of editing to the HTML (usually moving a div or something minor).

Jeremy Flint - 10th March 2004 16:21 - #

Hi Jeremy,

I certainly agree that the flexibility of CSS is the way forward, especially for quick, cross-site design changes (as you mention).

I think people are misunderstanding me slightly... I'm not anti-CSS by any means. It just feels like the standards (or perhaps the current crop of browsers) aren't quite finished yet.

Quote from an article on your own weblog (entitled 'The Curse of Internet Explorer'!):

I have had my own troubles with IE. The many versions that exist that are still in use by many people have caused me to install multiple versions of IE for testing sites. Each time I open a site up in a lower version of a browser, it seems I am having to fix something, which usually ends up cancelling out what I just fixed in a later version. It is a vicious, seemingly endless cycle.

These are kind of problems I have as well, and while it does get easier once you have learned the common bugs, it seems that each different layout brings a whole new set of entirely unrelated problems.

The hacks we are putting in now to 'hide' styles from certain browsers rely on bugs in the applications themselves. What will happen if/when those bugs are fixed and half our users switch to a browser with new bugs?

I don't mean to moan, I'm just enjoying the debate ;)

Mark Bell - 10th March 2004 16:55 - #

While I would never move back to non-CSS based styles, layout is something very different ... even on this site the single "position: absolute" entry screws up with the header when you make the browser smaller. So I can understand some of it, although even then the code like...

<table border=0 width=130 cellspacing="1" cellpadding="2" bgcolor="#000000" align="center">

...really should be fixed.

James Antill - 10th March 2004 21:09 - #

http://chris.pirillo.com/test/ *cough cough*

Chris Pirillo - 15th March 2004 02:41 - #