Out of Egypt:

CSS Revisited, or, the Woes of Web Design

In theory: an elegant language for describing how web pages should look. Everyone's favorite way to Separate Semantics from Presentation ^TM.

In practice: a giant hassle. A torture device for the graphically inclined. The gateway to bland fonts, boxy layouts, and browser quirks galore. The source of endless tedium that pleases no one but web standards geeks who like to show their superiority over everyone else.

The Web will not be a mature graphical medium until it has its own InDesign.

Of course, the awful state of the tools necessary for Web-based graphic design keeps many people gainfully employed. Good for them (someday, possibly me), but not good for organizations that don't have the resources to hire a Web development army just to get their message out on the Internet.

I suspect blogging platforms like MovableType & WordPress would be much less popular among businesses if it was actually easy to roll your own web design template. I'm going to have to give the YAML Builder a try.

By the way, A List Apart is overrated. Some of their articles are actually helpful; others just demonstrate how far apart "standards" and "simplicity" can be.