Did he bang my wife? Drink my liquor? Wreck my car? Steal my stereo? Tell me I was a amoral crazed libertine? Were we arguing over social security? The Iraq war?
Nope.
The crux of the debate centered around CSS image replacement techniques. Yeah -- "What the hell is that?" you might be thinking. Well its a geek thing and the argument we had / are having is about as divided as you can get. Like North Vs. South divided. It might seem stupid outside of IT, but you should just see how hostile things can get between say, an open source unix guy and well, anyone not using that platform. It gets ugly folks. Who knew, right?
We (my friend and I) just see things differently. There really is no right or wrong - its what works for you and what works for your clients. Still though, I get tired of having to defend shit. Every new technique that comes out on the web is not a hack. Not all old techniques are hacks either but time and progress does march on.
I guess my problem stems from the word hack - to me it has a derogatory connotation. I prefer the terms "method" or solution for my side of things. My buddy views image replacement techniques as a hack because he thinks they use the background property in CSS for a purpose other than which it was intended, namely to display an image which itself displays text or something like Britney Spears in a see through top or some such. A background, he thinks, should be just that, an abstract thing sitting behind the element like a color or a gradient pattern. If it has meaning of somesort, he wants it in an image tag. If its a spacer GIF, that's ok too. Moreover he sees it as hypocritical - because the same crowd, in general, that espouses this technique as capital G Good, and which he sees as a hack, decries the use of tables for anything other than a debit credit ledger or a phone list. See, tables were not meant to be layout elements, but people adapted them to it. Now people are using the background of elements to do funny things with image replacement and that's just crazy talk.
Me, I'm a bit of a tech crow. I like shiny sites. I like nice fonts and good design and clean crisp images and strong use of photography (within limits of the site objective, of course). To me the image replacement techniques are great. You get to have your cake and eat it too. In the end the site looks better, is accessible and indexable. Win Win Win. Moreover I like things modularized. I like the idea of markup that is ready to go anywhere and can be styled however it needs to be and still stay presentation free.
Still though, its a silly thing to be getting into a fight with a friend with. Of course, I really don't think he even thought we were having a fight. He wasn't. Me on the other hand...I was., I was just getting more and more pissed off and frustrated. Frustration leads to anger and anger leads to the Dark Side and bad dialogue that sounds like it was translated to German and back to English. Silly Silly.
Side bar -
Other 'hacks" (usage of something for other than what it was intended):
- The Wright Brothers Airflow Technique (man was not meant to fly -- but we do FALL really well)
- The Cousteau Drowning Negation Method (we do drown very well)
- The Commuter Lap Beverage Implementation (hey look a place for this 200 degree cup of coffee!)
- The Angry Wife Rolling Pin / Frying Pan Kinetic Solution (eh heh).
Ultimately, it seems man just does what he can with what he's got and we all do the best we can. What more can we ask of ourselves?
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