Jeff Atwood's post on MVC brings up a great philosophical question ...

• May 14, 2008
• James Skemp
• Internet, philosophy, technology

I forgot to comment on this the other day, when I first read the post.

Jeff Atwood, of Coding Horror, wrote a piece titled "Understanding Model-View-Controller" which brought forth this response from Shmork (I wish he would have posted a site):

I have to admit, as someone with more philosophical inclinations, I wonder whether the stated goal of totally separating content from representation is even a good idea. Certainly no graphic designer would sign on to that theory of the world, much less a philosophically inclined graphic designer. The world is not actually made up, ontologically, of objects whose logical value and whose representational value is totally separate—they are deeply intertwined.

I understand, of course, the practical benefits from doing such splitting. But I find it quite odd that computer people on the whole seem to think that this approach is a really elegant one. It's an idea which anyone in the humanities would find amusingly bad, one whose limitations are going to be on display constantly (as an example, witness how much hacky-looking CSS one generally needs to use in order to take a given HTML structure that was set up for a given page appearance to actually make it look totally different).

This made my day.

Jeff's site, by the way, should be on almost every Web person's radar. Once I do another nice theme for my site, I'll have to add the 'blog roll' back on so that I can add him and Mads at least. Or, do I just put the links somewhere instead?