Why HTML Sucks
Have you ever spent hours trying to work out why your latest CSS design doesn’t work, only to find you had a single character wrong in your code?
A few days ago I spent 1.5 hours trying to finalise a design for a client, only to find out that all the layout issues were the result of an extra bracket that was accidentally left in the CSS code. This is such a waste of time and money. It’s lost revenue because we like to charge on a per project basis here, not per hour (in the majority of cases).
I often blame CSS for many days and nights of hair pulling. Things were much easier in the days of table-based layouts right?
Then it hit me…
The challenge with modern web design isn’t the result of CSS, it’s a problem with HTML itself! HTML is too forgiving!
Think about it. Is it harder to find a problem with your simple HTML layout code or harder to debug a simple PHP application? It’s harder to find the problem with the HTML layout because web browsers are too forgiving. PHP on the other hand will usually stop in its tracks when there’s a problem. Even better, it will tell you the line number the error is on!
Sure, there are services such as the W3C Markup Validation Service that can find these errors, but it would be nice if it were integrated into all web browsers to the point where the HTML won’t ‘run’ if there’s clear errors (such as double brackets, missing inverted commas etc).
/end rant 
September 10th, 2008 at 11:48 am
I agree. I was shocked when I first started to write html after around 20 years of “proper” programming.
To be fair though, Firefox is pretty hot on pointing out css errors. A little too hot sometimes.
November 1st, 2008 at 2:02 am
I completely agree. If I spend some time designing for example 3 webpages for a webshop that are visualy attractive and correspond to css and html best practices. I can write the backend code for that webshop in half the time. It’s depressing how much time one has to spend making things visualy attractive and supported by most common browsers while writing the application code keeps getting easier. Why hasn’t anyone tried to make writing webpages easier. I can’t be the only one who thinks:
HTML and CSS suck!!!
December 19th, 2008 at 1:27 am
I agree too but it will never happen. If you implement strict html parsing you will doom the html to a non evolving state because backward compatibility will be painful.