[Gllug] Website developement

[Alex Hudson]

On 15 Jul 2001, Nix wrote:
> > Perl is higher level than both C and Java, probably also Lisp
> 
> That you say this indicates either that you do not know anything about
> Lisp, or, perhaps, that you don't know what the phrase `higher level'
> means :(

Obviously. Go on, tell me why the oldest high-level language in existence,
the one based on IBM machine code, is higher level than Perl...

> Don't count your chickens before they're hatched. I'm sure Skud and the
> rest of the language design people will try hard to ensure that it will
> rock, but you can't *know* that until after it's released.

Sure I do :-) I know the sun's coming up tomorrow morning - that hasn't
happened yet though. The probability of it not happening is so small it's
effectively 0.

> > first is separate presentation from content, which is where templates (et
> 
> This is, of course, the only sane way.

Sane for who? It's _easy_, perhaps, but leads to crap web pages :P

> > but gives the best results.
> 
> ... that is, it can look nice on totally broken browsers like Netscape 4
> and IE3, but can't change its appearance to compensate for variations in
> browser capability, is very hard to do, and is generally a Bad Idea.

No, not quite. Separating your presentation from your content doesn't
magically lead to good HTML, and vice versa.

> Everything I produce is designed properly. I can't see the point in
> going through endless agony to compensate for browsers with no style
> sheet support; they get a really plain look and have to live with it.

That wasn't the point I was making :) Complete separation of content from
presentation leads to dull, repetitive websites, and I would argue is also
bad design. Information is the context lent to data (at least partially),
and people use presentation to draw attention to different bits of data to
be informative. I'm not saying that's impossible with templates, but it's
a lot harder - either you need to have a lot of very similar information
(like a directory, shop, etc.) or you need a lot of specialised
templates. For a smaller site, I'd argue it's better to dump complete
content/presentation separation, and have a mix. 

Cheers,

Alex.


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