While many web designers seem to walk into the field without really understanding the purpose of the technology behind the Web, a number are aware of the issues I raise on this site, but are forced to design bad sites due to the demands of their customers and clients. Clients want multicolumn layouts because they appear to look good, and they don't have to worry about usability for a small but legitimate minority of visitors, even if they are warned about the problems faced by those visitors.

By looking around on the Web, clients are mislead into thinking that the Web is much more capable than it really is. As a result, they ask for more misleading designs to be published.

In order to satisfy both this market pressure, and the demands of usability, new technologies are needed. Popular browsers need to implement these features, and standards must be established for them to work to.

1. Most importantly, designers need to know whether their layouts are suitable for the medium – or rather, their designs themselves need to know. CSS3 Media Queries accomplish this.

   • Media Queries
     A proposed method of applying style conditionally on the medium and its characteristics

   Opera, Safari and Firefox have already implemented this, and it really shouldn't be too hard for other browsers to follow. (Of course, if you're not a developer of such a browser, it's easier said than done, but I like to hope that it's just a matter of priority)

2. Secondly, to preclude all excuses to use <table> and absolute positioning for layout, designers need a way to express tabular layout purely in CSS, so that media queries can be applied to it.

   • CSS Template Layout
     [Formerly Advanced Layout] A proposed layout method completely separate from HTML

   Again, speaking not as a browser programmer, I suppose and hope that it would be relatively easy to add this feature to any browser which already supports <table>.

3. To deal with some of the problems that specifying fonts causes, I'd like to propose a method of per-font-family size adjustment.

Together, these will allow designers to provide their customers with snazzy websites that also work (albeit less snazzily) in more constrained environments.