Commenting on my initial foray into syntax, Mart said:

I think a really important aspect is what the system defaults to if you don't give it a specific piece of info - like if you didn't specify sizes for #gc2, it would default to the simplest sensible configuration rather than making cells disappear off the edge of the screen

Choosing what defaults to use when will be really tricky, given how optimised CSS is, but it is really important will have to be addressed before it is possible to write pages at all.

An unexpected turn. Last night I sent a rant to Jeffrey Zeldman, of ALA and WaSP fame. The man is one of the gurus of web hacking and for some reason I felt like he might hear my plaintive call. Amazingly, he did. He told me that if I wanted to write an article about all this for ALA, he would consider publishing it. ALA has a readership of about 65,000 people a week!

First of all, wow! Secondly this, and other feedback I've had today, has put my activity so far into perspective a bit.

I've become way too passionate about it. I need to chill. I feel bad about the ranting and I apologise to all who bore the fury, particularly Eric Meyer. Who I actually also got a message from today, but it was just to tell me not to include replies in my messages to his css-discuss mailing list.

Also, perhaps dropping in and heckling the authors of CSS was not the best way to go about this. I was expecting them to enter into a discussion a bit more, but I guess that's a bit idealistic. Writing an article for ALA is the ideal next step. It will give me a forum to air my ideas and put them up for peer review. Hopefully I will be able to refine feedback from that article and other channels into an actual proposal. If I can't get the article on to ALA, then I guess I should just shut up.

I really should read more as well. Theres a lot left undiscovered in www-style archives. Zeldman has written a good many articles about web design that I haven't read and should. My argument will (and should) sink like a rock if I retread old ground, or fail to see the obvious.

The BBC news site could in many ways be described as a bellwhether and a goal. It's intensely gridded and is a pretty nice layout. Also, it's very highly visited and needs to be compatible with everything. They're not going to be abandoning tables soon. Still, the page could be used as a test case for new syntax.

One thing that occurs to me about any new kind of grid layout is that it needs to have a much more flexible approach to columns and rows. Obviously it wouldn't be a grid if there wasn't some kind of consistency in sizes between blocks, but when layouts get more complex the table author has to rely on increasingly more cunning configurations of colspan and rowspan in order to get the right sized blocks into the layout.

I have been thinking that a good system might be one where the author can define a basic grid, perhaps like this:

#g {
   display: grid;
   width: fit-viewport;
   height: fit-viewport;
   x-subdivisions: 3;
   y-subdivisions: 3;
}

And then define how blocks interact with that grid (gu = grid units):

#gc1 {
   display: grid-cell;
   top: 0;
   left: 0;
   width: 3gu;
   height: 1gu;
}

#gc2 {
   display: grid-cell;
   top: 1gu;
   left: 0;
   width: 3gu;
   height: 2gu;
}

When applied to the following HTML:

<div id="g">
   <div id="gc1">
      Hi mum!
   </div>
   <div id="gc2">
      Look at my page!
   </div>
</div>

This stylesheet would provide a result similar to this table, filling the whole browser window:

It also occurred to me that it might be possible to write a simple transformation engine for CSS that takes my suggested syntax and renders it in current HTML+CSS as best it can. Ideally the HTML would not need to be rewritten and the CSS could be translated easily by mapping fluid values on to a specified frame size, in the same way that a browser would eventually anyway. This would be a valuable resource for testing and experimenting. Maybe it's worth investigating SAC, but it might more useful just to implement it with REs.

CSS layout needs to be symmetrical. I'm not sure how the conversation got started, but posts from this thread have turned up in a number of my trawls through the www-style archives. It's fairly recent (2002) and there seems to be a lot of opinion being about the CSS's deficiencies.

<rant offensiveness="uncompromising">

Feeling really pissed off right now. I just put IE PC back into standards mode by removing the XML prolog from all of the pages of this site, only to see my vertically centered content disappear to the top of the window.

How can any system claim to be a complete design tool when it's concept of space is so wildly schizophrenic (it's some paper, it's a window, it looks crap whatever media you choose)? Because nobody responsible for thinking it up was a designer, that's how.

I've been reading some of the extracts from Eric Meyer's Eric Meyer on CSS. Eric is one of the WG as well. His page is bullshit, I'm sorry, I'm sure he's a great guy and everything and he has certainly been a key player in getting us to the situation we're at now. However, all he does is bang on about how CSS is God's gift to designers. He demonstrates this with a series of lacklustre designs that clearly originate from the bottom up. Then, in one example that does look vaguely nice, his demo copy is a thinly veiled attack on "pretentious" designers! Aaargh! It makes me livid.

These people are taking the web back to the days when we were all hacking tables to do cool stuff. They've written crap specs so that we're all forced to buy their books or pour through vast tutorials telling us how to make ugly pages we don't want!

Designers work top-down and while there are no people producing layouts in Illustrator and feeding them to the community, web design is fucked. Adoption of XHTML and CSS layout is not going to happen. I'm even considering putting my prologs back in and perhaps dropping back to XHTML transitional or even HTML 4.

As a side note. I briefly went looking for the origins of the tables bad mantra. It seems to me that it's a semantic point raised in passing in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. That's it. Tables aren't accessible so web designers should be deprived of their most expressive tool and not given a replacement. Cunts!

The more I think about this the more I think that the way forward is to bring tables right on back again, but in the way I outlined earlier. Create a new set of syntax starting with some display properties called grid or something and implement them in CSS3. Examine why authors are using tables and provide them with a better alternative, instead of telling them they suck because blind people don't get design. That's never been an issue in any other market, where design is vital to performance, so why should poor beleagured web authors be crapped on by a standards body that's out of touch with reality?

</rant>

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Last updated at 11:32, Wednesday June 18th, 2008. All times are shown in 24-hour clock format and are BST.

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