Wake up, Entertainment industries

Music sales plunged another 15 percent in 2007. Meanwhile, the record labels via the RIAA continue to treat paying customers like criminals. You can rip your CDs to your computer and other devices. No, wait you can't. Yes, actually we misspoke IN COURT. That's not what we meant. Fair use? What's that?

So you bail on the music industry and start watching TV. But wait, there's a writers strike. So no new shows which require writers are being made. And this has been going on since November.

If it wasn't in the news would anyone have noticed? Or care? Is anyone going to miss the Golden Globes when the actors won't cross the picket lines and so it won't be televised? Doubt it.

Seriously. What the entertainment industry hasn't quite grasped yet is that there are a billion forms of entertainment out there. If they don't offer a product or make it too difficult to use fairly people will just go do something else.

I can't legally rip my CDs to a shared folder on my server so I can access them from my desktop and my laptop? Gee, thanks. Maybe I'll watch some CSI:Fargo reruns instead.

Or maybe I'll go to the library and get a book. At least that's still free. For now.

CSS-Driven Layouts vs. Table-Driven Layouts

Like many people, I like to browse the world wide web. It's a great resource for researching information, buying things, or just plain having fun. Go web!

However, several things have conspired to make my web browsing less enjoyable than it could be. There are three main problems which, when added together, cause me headaches (literally and figuratively).

Problem #1: Tiny Pixels

Displays have gotten bigger, but not as fast as pixels have gotten smaller. On modern displays, pixels are now really, really tiny. This is both good (really crisp, beautiful displays) and bad (fixed size images -- like those found all over the web -- end up being uncomfortably small to see properly).

Problem #2: Small Fonts

For some reason, small fonts are really popular on the web these days. Like, really uncomfortably small fonts. I know very few people over the age of 35 that likes those uncomfortably small fonts. I can only conclude that most web developers have 30" displays or most web developers are under the age of 35.

Firefox to the Rescue!

Fortunately, using an excellent web browser such as Firefox, I can increase the font size on the pages I browse. Typically, I increase the font size two or three steps. This results in a font size that's generally very comfortable for me to read.

Alas, an ugly problem has cropped up in recent years that makes my solution much less ideal.

Problem #3: CSS-Driven Layouts

I'm not precisely sure what the problem is, but over 90% of the web sites I visit render very poorly when you increase the font size two or three steps. These web sites almost always have one thing in common: their layout is done via CSS.

Sometimes the problem is reasonably minor: text overlapping other text. Sometimes the problem is much worse: the page becomes completely unreadable due to all the rendering problems.

The excuse I typically hear from web developers is, "That's because people don't know how to use CSS properly." However, the problem is so pervasive that I've got to wonder if CSS is just too unwieldy of a technology to be used for page layout. It appears to me that CSS has some serious usability problems, at least when applied to page layout.

Web sites that use table-driven layouts don't seem to have these problems. These days, however, you're considered an ignorant buffoon if your web page is laid out using tables instead of CSS (an Ivory Tower attitude I don't at all agree with).

As a result, from the perspective of a user (not a developer!) of the web, I say: DIE CSS-driven layouts! GO GO table-driven layouts!

My friend who started and runs this blog, Rick, loves and worships CSS, so I'm hoping he'll write an article which defends his pro-CSS-driven layout position. :-)