Publishing on the Web is very different from older methods of publication. A Web publication is inherently a general, device-independent and program-independent document with structural markup. The presentation of a document may vary greatly, and it must vary, to allow viewing (or hearing) the same document on a wide variety of devices, ranging from wristwatch monitors to full-size movie screens.

Why the fuck don't we get this yet? We've been doing this for 17 years now, and for all the trendy lip service arty web geeks pay to upholding "web standards" we still end up with shit like this. Got a large screen? Too bad. Fixed margins. Pixel offsets. You *will* look at this webpage this way and no other way (unless you want to write your own style sheet to use my horribly named DOM classes that is).

Just try to increase the font size on any "modern" webpage and watch it utterly break.

We have jumped from enforcing design through diarrhea of the <TABLE> tag in the 90s, to enforcing design through obscenely complex CSS styles. It's the same damn thing.

Publishing on the Web Is Different!