Regarding “workability”, a good design agency should understand the different components of each web page, and build them as distinct parts, so that they can be dealt with in a mostly standalone fashion from the rest of the page.

Comparing CSS to a procedural programming language is an apples-to-oranges comparison. CSS is a declarative language; you state the rules you want to enforce, and the browser applies them. Criticizing the complexity of the rules (and the cascade) is fair game, but comparing it to for statements that change their meaning seems inapt.

The float property continues to have a place in web pages, not just print; however, its use to generate columns is problematic. The support offered by CSS3 for columns is a better approach and allows content to automatically flow from one column to another, something that cannot be done with tables.

Lastly, note that the intent of CSS is to decouple the HTML source from how it is presented, which increases the amount of independence between the back-end code generating the HTML and the visual design. Though it doesn’t fully achieve this goal, certainly compared with a mass of nested tables, it is much simpler to make changes to the HTML generation or the layout.

But I’m thinking about discussing a more hybrid approach to chunk up the work in small pieces to get the designer more involved and avoid the duplicate work.

So thanks for the insights, was a interesting discussion :)

K. Scott: I fell off my seat at the sexually deviant designer part.

That’s not exactly the message of the interview or the subject. The point is not learning HTML and CSS, something I have a pretty good proficiency with after doing it since installing Spy Glass off of a disk that came with O’Reily’s Best of the Web. The point is understanding and commanding productivity to a level rarely seen in software projects, something that requires understanding application markup. That understanding doesn’t come from doing HTML and CSS, but from optimizing software product development efforts.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by wardrobeguy: GEEK NEWS Herding Code 69: Scott Bellware on HTML Specialists http://bit.ly/4vk1aH...