I've been wondering lately if there shouldn't be two ways to do page layout. CSS + HTML is awesome for documents, which 99% of the web is. However, it seems like lots of people really want "brochure"-type pages, with crazy fonts, specific positioning of boxes of text and images, and lots of graphics. From looking around, it seems like every single one has to go through some horrible contortions of CSS and nested wrapper divs.
I'm not sure which is the best approach, you either end up with a page looking like 37signal's landing page, or you have 8MB of images and 30 absolute positioned divs, ala CSS Xen Garden.
I'm a programmer, not a designer, but every time I try to put together a front page that looks good, both to the user's eye and to the HTML maintainer's, I feel like I'm really fighting the natural way of doing it. I wish it was better, but I'm at a loss as to how.
It's called pdf and it's there. Adobe Reader supports all sorts of webbish features such as hyperlinks or JavaScript. For some reason, it's not very popular as a hypertext document format (and neither are MS Word documents, an other similar contender)
I'm not sure which is the best approach, you either end up with a page looking like 37signal's landing page, or you have 8MB of images and 30 absolute positioned divs, ala CSS Xen Garden.
I'm a programmer, not a designer, but every time I try to put together a front page that looks good, both to the user's eye and to the HTML maintainer's, I feel like I'm really fighting the natural way of doing it. I wish it was better, but I'm at a loss as to how.