Christina Wodtke (of Elegant Hack) has a very interesting article on Boxes and Arrows about the current state of their (incredibly long) redesign.

The essence of the article is the importance of collaborative iteration. Good stuff.

But what I particularly liked was this little tidbit:

We thought if we wrote nice, semantic HTML all it would take to customize would be stylesheets, Zen-garden style. Again, we were mistaken. … A stylesheet can take you only so far, despite many articles to the contrary. It’s really not possible to completely separate form and presentation, as [our design firm] learned to their chagrin. They struggled mightily to get the new B&A design launched for the 2006 IA Summit, giving up sleep only to see the launch fade in the 11th hour, thwarted by what CSS can and cannot do.

I’ve recently had occasion to do some CSS tweaking (which means, I’m starting with some existing CSS and revising it to match a new design). Now, to be fair, the truth of the matter is that I really got out of serious HTML coding before CSS became popular. I also got out of hardcore programming before OOP (object-oriented programming) became popular.

So CSS has been driving me crazy, what with the difference between classes and ids, browser diffs, inheritance and so on. And imagine my joy having tried to do CSS for HTML emails, which is a royal pain … I spent hours getting it to render reasonably, and now our email vendor has replaced it all with tables and font tags…sigh.

Given this, I’m curious about Liquid markup, a template language that Christina is now using on Boxes and Arrows. Is it the future?