I have been going through the process of building a Joomla web site for a client.  I don’t think they had outrageous demands for the UI design.  Lots of fonts, colors, a few popups.

First off, tinyMCE by default “cleans up” your edited content.  This might mean stripping HTML tags, changing HTML tags or even better adding in a few extra HTML tags.  Really quite a feature.  So, now your very elaborate content ‘article’ has been manipulated badly by the article editor, it needs to be displayed.

A typical Joomla installation might have 10 CSS sheets, all of which are in play and possibly touching each other on a given page.  This makes it real fun to figure out really simple things, like how to set the width of the page.

Now, we add in the editor manipulated content that needs to be displayed with several bogus style references and you end up with total c _ _ _.  You have close to zero chance of figuring out why your content changed line height, font, indent, color, you name it – right in the middle of a paragraph.

I blame all of this on the cute idea of using table-less layouts via CSS.  That ideal means that people have gone to the next step and are using CSS everywhere.  It kind of reminds me of the first round of C++ programmers in the 80’s.  Everyone was doing it with no grasp of the underlying object oriented concepts needed.  So, we ended up with very hard to determine memory leaks in all kinds of programs (from simple apps to MS Windows).   I think the same thing is going on now, everyone is using CSS without any idea of the fundamental style concepts involved in the base HTML entities.  And we end up with the same mangled set of code which has very little hope of being displayed correctly.