

How Twitter is Destroying the Web - timothyecrosley
http://timothyecrosley.blogspot.com/2013/10/how-twitter-is-destroying-web.html

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jt2190

      > There is, however, a major problem with Twitters 
      > bootstrap framework... [a] return to all the problems 
      > that came with tables. A complete rejection of the 
      > agreed upon separation between semantic content and 
      > visual design.
    

First of all, the semantic web was _never_ widely agreed upon in practice [1],
simply because almost everyone is interested in generating a particular page
layout first. For whatever reason, the standards bodies have tried to pretend
that prioritizing the semantic web in the HTML standards would somehow change
the behavior of most web developers. It hasn't.

The fundamental issue is that there was a "tight coupling" between page layout
and data structure in early web browsers, and while CSS has helped separate
layout from HTML, it has not changed the behavior of web developers _en masse_
, who will hack HTML to kingdom come if it gets them the page layout they
want. (If you only every use <div> tags, you're not doing semantic HTML.)

But things are actually looking quite bright, because we now have RESTful web
services, that operate solely with data structures (typically JSON), so REST
is essentially the modern semantic web. That frees HTML from the burden of
being a data structure at all.

Now if we could just replace HTML and CSS with something that actually gave
you a WYSIWYG page layout, we'd be all set.

[1] As evidence of this, I point you to the HTML parsers of all major
browsers, and the Google web crawler/parser. Neither of these assume that
pages are valid, let alone semantic.

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Raphmedia
The web changed. Once again.

Now, the web is responsive. You no longer have to take into account one state
for your website, but up to 4 or 5 (if not more). Mobile, tablet, desktop,
large desktop.

The reason we changed from table to semantic driven HTML is that tables were
not suited for its task anymore. Right now, semantic driven websites, while
completely valid, are the the right tool for task anymore.

Sure, you can name all your classed to be 100% semantic and have the whole
thing fall down like a waterfall when you turn off the CSS. It's so easy to
change the layout of the website!

The problem is, that's not the main issue anymore. Most of the energy is put
into making a website... 4 time during development. You can't simply style
your blocs all over again and again. The need for a framework get felt, a lot.

Then, if you really need to move your website around during a redesign... why,
it's easy! Simply change "large-4" to be "large-8". You want to move it
around? No problem, simple copy it into another row. As long as your rows are
semantic, you shouldn't have any issue restyling the whole thing.

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skrebbel
This must be a troll. Twitter is destroying the web because 2 employees
released some open source? Really?

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molecule
> Bootstrap's documentation however does not encourage this method of use, and
> instead repeatedly demonstrates classes intermixed with HTML.

Since there's not a link to one in the blog post, are we to assume that the
author wrote this rant without submitting an issue or pull request to
Bootstrap?

[https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap](https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap)

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zem
i would be a lot more sympathetic to all the "don't use tables for markup"
people if css had, in all the years of its existence, said "you know what?
grids and boxes are a really handy layout tool!" and made them easier to do.
spans and flows simply don't cut it. the fact that there are css grid
_frameworks_ is ample evidence that people are viewing css's "right way to do
things" as damage and routing around it.

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molecule
a more constructive thesis for this post would have been: Why You Should Use
Mixins w/ Bootstrap.

e.g. [http://ruby.bvision.com/blog/please-stop-embedding-
bootstrap...](http://ruby.bvision.com/blog/please-stop-embedding-bootstrap-
classes-in-your-html)

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JacksonGariety
If this gets voted to the top I won't sleep well.

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danso
First of all, I thought Bootstrap was no longer part of Twitter, officially?

Second, enclosing elements in tables is a whole other level of violating the
divide between content and visual design. There's not even a close comparison
between row/spans and the restrictions of a tabular element.

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Skovy
...very interesting...

