Re: Best Practices: CGI.pm & CSS2 ???
On Tue, 2003-12-30 at 17:26, Chris Wagner wrote:
> Cascading Style Sheets. Deprecated. I have seen so many bad uses of style
> sheets it makes me want to cry out in anger. So just don't use them unless
> there's no other way to do it. They are almost guaranteed to cause
> compatibility problems. The problem is that some bonehead writes a style
> sheet that makes a webpage look good on *their* computer. To hell with
> everybody else who doesn't have the same monitor, resolution, fonts,
> browser, etc. The one thing they are "good" for is making themes but be
> careful that it's still ledgible on other machines. I have them turned off
> in my browser.
This is probably going to end up as a flamewar, but I'll throw in my two
cents anyways.
CSS is the next step for web-design, and definitively a step in the
right direction. They are in no way "deprecated". True, there are many
badly written CSS-based websites out there, but misuse of the technology
is in no way indicative of its merits. The major problem with css right
now is that IE (as usual) has unbelievably bad support for the standard.
Most other browsers handle them well, and altough it's a pain in the
ass, you can always get around the horrible ie bugs.
Some of the major benefits of css are:
- Complete separation of content structure and presentation. HTML was
originally intended for content structure, not design, which has
resulted in hacks such as transparent gifs and nested tables.
- Media-independent presentation. Well-written XHTML/CSS pages can be
viewed nicely in graphical and text-based browsers, cell phones, pdas,
on paper, blind-terminals, as audio through a speech synthesizer etc.
- User-supplied style sheets can override author-provided ones, for
example letting people with poor sight use larger fonts and colors with
better contrast.
- Much easier to maintain - just change your css file, and the design of
your entire site is updated. It is also much easier to read and
understand the code.
- Less bandwidth use and faster load times (better responsiveness) - I
have myself reduced a ~1000 line HTML document to around 100 lines of
XHTML/CSS.
- It also provides many, many features which would be completely
impossible to do with standard html, such as block-justifying text in a
column or having content flow around a document element.
For an example of the truly amazing things you can accomplish with css,
check out http://www.csszengarden.com/
The best way to learn css is probably by reading the book HTML Utopia:
Designing Without Tables Using CSS: http://www.sitepoint.com/books/css1/
w3c has an extensive list of resources for learing css at
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/learning
You can also check out http://www.w3schools.com/ for many nice
introductory articles on xhtml and css, or read the spec at
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/ - I always keep it open when developing
websites.
--
Erik Grinaker
http://erikg.wired-networks.net
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