I'm struck by the contrast between the conventional wisdom that content and layout should be kept separate, and the recent highlighting of Mike Bostock's work at the New York Times on articles like http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/03/world/middleea...
I've always been dubious about how well that mantra applies to web applications, but conventional wisdom certainly has it that content and layout separation works most strongly for documents; but Mike's work shows that layout can be a powerful component of messaging.
Producing pieces like the ISIS layout requires a much richer concept of separating the layers that go into the final presentation; paragraphs of text associated with geographical regions, times, and news events are the content items - not simple divs with classes, but rich objects. Choosing then how to lay those out is clearly far beyond the capabilities of CSS. And while in theory the layout logic to display a scrollable strip map with location markers could be reused for another story, in truth that layout is part of this article, not a generic 'stylesheet' that would be shared by a number of documents containing similar objects.
We need tools that facilitate creation of procedural layouts. CSS has its place in specifying typographic conventions, but it's a hindrance to making more interesting content-led layouts.
I've always been dubious about how well that mantra applies to web applications, but conventional wisdom certainly has it that content and layout separation works most strongly for documents; but Mike's work shows that layout can be a powerful component of messaging.
Producing pieces like the ISIS layout requires a much richer concept of separating the layers that go into the final presentation; paragraphs of text associated with geographical regions, times, and news events are the content items - not simple divs with classes, but rich objects. Choosing then how to lay those out is clearly far beyond the capabilities of CSS. And while in theory the layout logic to display a scrollable strip map with location markers could be reused for another story, in truth that layout is part of this article, not a generic 'stylesheet' that would be shared by a number of documents containing similar objects.
We need tools that facilitate creation of procedural layouts. CSS has its place in specifying typographic conventions, but it's a hindrance to making more interesting content-led layouts.