Dear web developers

Tuesday, February the second, two thousand and ten.

As any good rant does this one starts with a disclaimer, lest you leave this page thinking I’m just having a good moan (I am).

I will state now that I’m all for experimentation with new web technologies - it’s done us pretty well so far - It’s just that, recently, I’ve been seeing more and more of these “CSS3″ showcases…

A couple of examples:

http://www.romancortes.com/blog/pure-css-coke-can/
http://anthonycalzadilla.com/css3-ATAT/index.html

Wow, amazing, they did that only using CSS? Well, yes, sort of (with a dash of propriety browser technologies in certain cases), but this is no more than e-stone soup.

While harmless enough shared around your fellow web geeks, these sorts of things can push budding developers in entirely the wrong direction, remember the massive hype around “tableless layouts”? A brilliant idea that due to a few loud-mouthed - misguided - individuals, saw a large number of web of developers in the early 2000s missing the point entirely.

Let’s use CSS3 and HTML5 as it was intended to be used. Let’s show the world what we have to say in an interesting, gripping, accessible and ascetic manner.