Re: Why use Templates at all?

[antjock]

For a good read on the aspect of separation of content, code, and markup, check out this article.

Having been in the situation of trying to champion/explain/maintain templated sites in a large corporation, and having been caught up in the "code must always be separated from markup" daze, this article helped me see that deciding not to always strive for maximum separation is not a bad thing.

[amelinda]

Yuck. It reads like a combination marketingdroid-artiste.

Am I alone in wishing that we could have a media-free¹ environment in which people could express their ideas without their message being tweaked by layout or fonts or backgrounds or "vision" - am I the only dyed-in-the-wool intellectual left? I want to hear ideas, not hype.

¹ media, plural of medium, meaning the materials used to make a presentation, like canvas, oil, <blink> tags, clay, VRML objects, ink, Ariel fonts, and so on. I'd settle for a "one-medium" environment².

² Like lynx intended... Gahhhh. This belongs on purists.org or something.

[coreolyn]

While I enjoy your vile distaste for the specious nature of information delivery, I am more amused by sophistic approach you use to proclaim your view as intellectual.

Should we have quit building homes out of mud?

I completely agree that the purity of minimalism is virtuous, but it assumes that 'ideas' can only be expressed through a medium of words-concepts. It denies genius and creative expression given via color, shape, and demension. Not that I've seen any media that expresses genius such as this yet, but we are still in a genesis of the technology.

While I can quite sympathize with what you must view as a total bastardization of purity, I'm actually more excited by the new concepts and idea's that arise from those that have yet to find the tools they require to adequately express their ideas-intellect to the world.

coreolyn

[amelinda]

I see I have, in my distaste for hype, given you reason to conflate my attitude regarding the tone of the article mentioned and your assumptions about my attitude towards the potential inherent in the new media that computers and the Internet provide to those talented with the gift of creativity.¹ My apologies.

I'd like to point out that I did not say, "all communication should be media-free." I said that I would like to see a place where communication could occur in a media-free environment. I have a dream ... of people discussing ideas and philosophies calmly and rationally, considering them on their own merits instead of the hype that surrounds them². Perhaps that doesn't make me an intellectual; it makes me a freak.

I wrote several further paragraphs in this vein, but then discussed at length essentially the same topic in the cheddarbox and elected to delete what would be little more than an invitation to flame.

---

"To rational thought, and the pursuit of dreams, two commodities that seem to be in short supply these days: May they always complement each other, and may they never need collide."

^{1 3} Ah, the joy of large vocabularies. :)
² See Also: American Presidential Races, post-1960.
³ Footnotes are your friends.