Waiting on Capitol Hill

I’m ready for a set of css standards that can be hung on a wall. In the absence of it, personal preferences and frankenstein techniques come into play and eff with code versatility.

Given a long enough timeline involving enough developers, you’ll see what I’m talking about. I’ll give you a quick example, though: misuse of whitespace resets.

I’m all for resets so long as they don’t involve an asterisk. The name is misleading, though. Very little is actually being reset. In most cases, the browser-defined preferences are simply being cleared out, leaving certain html elements devoid of any visual interpretability whatsoever.

The idea, of course, is that these styles would then be set to apply a new style to each occurrence of the respective element. But that part gets missed. (Especially in cases built around placeholder content.)

Developers define attributes for specific occurrences of the element (i.e., design interface occurrences) but miss the global instances that can kill content readability. Paragraphs get slammed together, lists are left without visual queues identifying them as such, blockquotes look like plagiarized content, etc.

It seems like this shouldn’t happen. But an absence of comprehensive standards results in people employing the incomplete kind. And bad code finds its way online.

I’m looking forward to the day this changes. Despite all the gross code I’ve contributed personally over the years, I’m still surprised at how often these things come up.