What is wrong with bloated markup?
Jeffrey @Zeldman is the Godfather of Web Standards. I learned to read [HTML] with Designing With Web Standards, a graciously simple and seminal book.
Zeldman gave a great interview with Jared Ponchot and Jeff Robbins for the informatively Drupalesque Lullabot podcast. Not surprisingly, it's about web standards and the future of web technologies.
There's a very interesting discussion about responsive web design (designing the one thing for different platforms) and which is also the title of a book by Ethan Marcotte. All very exciting stuff (and I know, I'm a safe distance behind the bleeding hedge).
But I am still unsure of one thing: what is wrong with bloated markup?
This issue came up with the discussion on Adobe's Muse AKA “Web DTP for the rest-of-us”. No need to code, just bish, bash, bosh, and out come your designs at the other end, ready-rolled HTML and CSS.
Admittedly, the code is convoluted. Does this matter though, as long as it is accessible and semantically correct, and if you only ever use Muse and no Olde Worlde hand-coder ever need get their grubby fingers on it?
By way of illustration, compare the SVG code below left with the HTML produced by Muse on the right. I never hand-code my SVG image files, I leave that to Inkscape, vector illustration program extrodinaire. Likewise, does it matter if I never hand-code my HTML?
