Little Green Footballs, which has gained prominence right after 9/11 and has been around even longer than that, has finally switched to div based layouts.
While not everyone agrees with the politics of LGF’s owner, Charles Johnson, his site is a shining example of the evolution of the blog. Still, why does it over 7 years for him to finally change the front-end? I can think of two reasons
1. Not enough time. The Front-end is dead last in a web dev’s priorities.
2. CSS layouts, despite being around forever, is not in the curriculum of CS departments.
The first reason comes from experience. In my old job I was the only front-end guy surrounded by a sea of PHP developers. In that environment, the mentality of “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it” prevails.
The second reason, is from observation only. Having met many developers who lap me in PHP, ASP, and Javascript skills but have trouble with HTML/CSS, I suspect CSS is not in most CS curriculum. I did not study CS and picked up all my HTML/CSS skills from the internet so I do not have this problem. Even Johnson, who has probably been a webdev forever and coded every possible blog feature in existance, picked up CSS layouts from this book, which was published only two years ago.
What does this mean? Because of time constraints and education most web developers will still be “specialists” in their programming language even if they “know” other skills. Not to mention, HTML/CSS is often tedious and nerve-wracking.
In other words, I still have a job.
