When did HTML get so crazy?

Subtitle: Why I will never be a successful web designer.

Just so you know, every time I reference "the website" in this post, I'm referring to this.

I was working on the website earlier, and Mark told me I should be using the div tags to do layout. I thought that sounded like a good idea, use something more powerful than the useless align tags, and how hard could it possibly be?

I quickly found out that to do anything useful without retyping a lot of stuff I had to use a cascading style sheet. No problem, I've used them before, how hard could it be?

It took me all day to get the thing to look right. I don't want to relive all my frustrations, but NOWHERE does it say that the order of the div attributes is important. Not one reference I found said "put this first or nothing will work". If they had, I would have had a much easier time of it, I'm sure.

So, in the interest of public knowledge, if you're using the div tag to put a text box in the lower corner of the page, you MUST put the position attributes first. If you don't, it might look okay in an editor, but in a browser it'll be wrong.

In the same vein, if you're using automatic padding, that has to go last in the list, otherwise it'll expand itself when you try to see how it looks and mess up all the attributes beneath it. For some reason it'll put the individual padding values in between the parts of other attributes, and I have no idea way or how it does it.

All that said, I've gotten a decent layout going without using too many fancy tricks, and I'm almost afraid to use anything more complicated. If I had this much trouble understanding the simple stuff, I can't even imagine how frustrating the complicated stuff is going to be.

Now, that covers the basis of this post, but how did it come to this? HTML authoring used to be so simple, so pure. You'd just toss a few tags in, and it would look decent. I can remember making websites that used at most 6 different tags, and there was nothing wrong with them.

As Mark put it, the page looks like it's straight out of 1995. Besides the fact that there's no information on it yet, what's so bad about that? It's got information and links to the important stuff. What more do you need?

Seems to be the march of progress, I guess. Everybody wants fancy websites with funky layouts and graphics everywhere. I don't see the point of having a site that takes forever to load and is useless until it does, and there I see the strength of text. In the time it takes your site with all graphical menus and mouseover effects and whatever else you have to load, a user can already have read most of my site. They can get the information they need and be on their way happy, instead of sitting and waiting for a ton of graphics to load.

Granted that's less of a concern these days, seeing how common high speed internet is. However, there's still a large population using dialup connections. You have to fit the technology level to the lowest level user you have, or else you'll alienate some users. Some people are willing to trade the lost users for the fancier website. I'm not one of them.

This is my downfall. I understand the users, but I can't relate to the people in charge.

As the code evolves to allow fancier features, I will fall farther behind. It's inevitable. I have the tools I'm comfortable with. I hope you can hear me from all the way back here in 1995.