Call me a cynic, but posts like this one on the Surfin’ Safari blog worry me a little. Let me explain…

I don’t know if anyone remembers back to the days of Netscape 4 and Explorer 3.5? - It was a time of table based layouts and browser sniffing. Each browser had it’s own “feature” set and this resulted in hacks galore, for example Netscape had “Layers” but Explorer didn’t, Explorer had feature X but Netscape didn’t.

Along came Web Standards and the likes of Jeffrey Zeldman fighting for a standards based approach to web development. Over a decade on, it looks like were finally getting there as even Microsoft slowly start to get things right with IE7.

As cool as the CSS Transform stuff looks, I can’t help but thing we’re stepping right back into 1995.

What does everyone else think?

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One thing that annoyed me when I first started using Rails at 0.14 was that I was forced to put my .css files in a ’stylesheets’ directory and my .js files in a ‘javascripts’ directory.

Previous to Rails I would put .css files in a ‘css’ directory and .js files in a ‘js’ directory (call me old fashioned). I use the following code in my application helper to allow me to do this:

module ApplicationHelper
  def javascript_path(source) compute_public_path(source, 'js', 'js') end
  def stylesheet_path(source) compute_public_path(source, 'css', 'css') end
end

Just incase anyone else has the same niggle.

Update 29-11-08: for Rails 2.2, see new post.