Hey, its my first blog! It has been awesome! But, I listened to other bloggers talk about how blogging should be regular and I’m calling BS. I made my blog something others advised and was not true to what I wanted: awesomeness.

I want to blog about what I think is awesome, when its awesome. I don’t want to blog about something because its time too. That kinda stuff if for people who want to gain or make a living blogging. I don’t!

I’m not saying you can’t blog regularly, time your posts, make a few bucks, and be amazing at it. I’m saying I don’t want my blog to take of my blog. So, this place is coming down… most of what I have here will exist on my new site but some will be gone forever.

Because of this mess a few creative practitioners taught us to separate our content, presentation and behaviors. But, this ideal paradigm is incapable of fulfilling the needs of the web today.

So along came what I will call divergence; or convergence if you look at it from another perspective. Divergence in web development is the braking apart semantics, presentation, and behavior. However, it is not complete separation of the layers.

In divergence you can use presentation with semantics, as long as it’s semantic (not likely to happen because presentation is rarely semantic).  And, you can use behavior within semantics as long as it’s semantic. And, you can use behavior within presentation as long as it’s presentational.

This is basically a conditional AND, not OR, statement versus the boolean ideals behind separation.

For example, in HTML5 we have type=”email”. Attached to this semantic value is form validation, or a behavior; it’s ok to use under divergence.

This is true because the value email is semantic when in use and the behavior supports its semantics. However, if we were to use the font tag we would not be diverging because the font tag is not semantic and presentational, it is only presentational. And, so, we diverge font styling into our CSS only.

If we want to apply JavaScript to our HTML we can’t add it into the HTML body because it is not semantic and behavioral. The JavaScript would need to diverge. And, if we wanted to use behavior within CSS, our presentation, it needs to be both presentational and behavioral.

Under this methodology we keep our semantics, presentation, and behaviors intact while working with new technologies.

More to come later…

A few purists, I’m sure, will be outraged by what I’m saying. But, if the truth be told, the pseudo class hover has been triggered by user action for quite a while. That is, behavior within presentation.

From the CSS specification, “Interactive user agents sometimes change the rendering in response to user actions. CSS provides three pseudo-classes for common cases.”

This has made me question the principle behind separation of content, presentation and design. And, as I have investigated the idea behind separation, inspiring as it is, I have not found it to be practical.

Separation is a novel idea. It has guided the design style of many amazing programmers and artists. It has led to numerous beautiful and functional websites. But, this segregation of content, presentation and behavior is, as I have found it, much like XHTML 2: little more than an idealistic view worth stemming from.

It is time to leave this ideology behind us. It has served its purpose practically and well. Times are changing and new technologies are piping a different tune: divergence.

It is time to start diverging, not separating.

Part Two: Divergence explained

Check out this weeks episode or Subscribe in iTunes

You can find the podcast and all of the podcast show notes online at http://zero1productions.com/webweekly/.

Check out this weeks episode or Subscribe in iTunes.

The real power is in the code. If you plan to make a application that needs to find the html elements of a page and you can’t access the DOM give this a shot.

While the application will not give you attributes, yet, or give you a multi-dimensional-array, yet, I think you might find it useful down the road. Please give it a look and tell me what you think.

And, yes! This is open source.

Check out this weeks episode or Subscribe in iTunes.

Update: Podcast has been cleared! Subscribe in iTunes

Also, we are working on making the podcast better. Please bear with us as we get more organized, and our nerves calm down.