This to me, is the one of the two huge advantages of CSS based design. (I never liked locking page structure to layout, as you have with tables.)

In fact, this disassociation of page-layout from structure is the main reason I put up with CSS’ shortcomings:

The CSS page-level layout paradigm sucks.

The other advantage of CSS, is of course the centralization of presentation code in a style sheet – the ‘cascade’ in CSS.

I appreciate your comments.

Stefan

“Conditional comments are not part of the web standards.”

True – I guess what I meant was that conditional comments are used as a means of feeding alternate stylesheets to IE6, allowing the designer to code in a forward looking manner, without hanging an old buggy browser out to dry. In this sense I think of conditional comments as a powerful weapon in the standards conscious web designers arsenal, a method to keep a site hack free without ignoring a browser that still commands an 80% market share.

I don’t see standards as a hinderance to my design process. Writing standards compliant (X)HTML markup isn’t difficult, and to my mind really just formalizes many conventions that were previously considered to be ‘best practice’: surrounding attributes in quotes, writing tags in lowercase, closing tags, etc. I find the process of validating my markup useful for spotting errors and shortfallings in my code, and oftentimes validation will draw my attention to the root cause of a layout ‘bug’.

The trickier bit is separating markup from presentation (ie: dropping tables for layout and using CSS instead). In this respect, supporting IE6 does add slightly to development time. But personally I would rather be writing sites for the minority (the standards compliant browsers) first, and retrospectively adding workarounds to keep things looking good in IE6. It may be a wee way off, but now that IE7 is released IE6 usage will begin to dwindle, and I do not want to be tethered to bad coding practices necessitated by this dying browser.

Conditional comments are not part of the web standards.

“Isn’t writing clean markup at the heart of standards compliance? ”

It could be interpreted that way, but you can write clean code that doesn’t follow the web standards one bit … so to answer your question: no.

.. Writing clean code is writing clean code, regardless of the language.

Standards compliance (on the other hand,) is all about using code that the W3C certifies as being correct.

“To me, this indicates that you are writing for modern standards compliant browsers first, and then tweaking your CSS to make sure the layout doesn’t break in IE6.”

This is my approach because technically it makes sense. But my major concern is IE6 since today, it still represents the vast majority of web surfers.

“I can’t think of *anyone* who says “to hell” with the popular web browsers.”

Several authors have advocated the use of hacks, several have suggested that IE6 is ‘just one of the browsers’ – the implication that it is somehow just one of many … it is the ‘many’.

- Safari 2, Firefox 2, Opera 9, Netscape 8, Internet Explorer 7 = (maybe 30% of the audience.)

“To ignore IE6 would be commercial suicide for a web designer.”

I agree. And yet, I have found myself on many a Web standards compliant website where the code breaks in IE6.

An example of this is found in this very Wordpress theme .. the default theme no less that screws up in IE6. I had to rewrite some of the code to make it work in IE as it did in FF.

Thanks for the comments.

Stefan

You say that the ‘real-world standards’ are to be found in the browsers. To my knowledge all of the browser manufacturers take web standards very seriously, and developing standards compliant sites for the current generation of browsers (Safari 2, Firefox 2, Opera 9, Netscape 8, Internet Explorer 7) is a relatively straightforward business. Admittedly Microsoft are still playing catch up with IE7, but the direction they are headed in seems fairly clear.

The only widely used browser that has truly cruddy standards support today is IE6. You yourself advocate the use of conditional comments to feed different stylesheets to IE6, to work around its poor CSS implementation. To me, this indicates that you are writing for modern standards compliant browsers first, and then tweaking your CSS to make sure the layout doesn’t break in IE6. This is exactly the approach that almost every real-world standards advocate I know endorses: I can’t think of *anyone* who says “to hell” with the popular web browsers. To ignore IE6 would be commercial suicide for a web designer.