PCMag: Why CSS Bugs Me – As we move into the age of Vista, multimedia’s domination on the desktop, and Web sites controlled by cascading style sheets running under improved browsers, when will someone wake up and figure out that none of this stuff works at all?!
Welcome to the party.
The way I see it, one should either use Ajax or severside to insert content into div’s. They should use HTML to do the layout. and they should use css, to set the style. I don’t think it is really meaningfull to try to set a column width with css (for some reason that is non standardised).
In what I would consider a well made web site, you would never have lots of pages with the same side bars. for this blog forinstance you could have randy.HTML with the side bar and the tile and a main element be a div. content like this post wold be loaded by Ajax into that div.
of course that is not yet possible (Ajax doesn’t work on mobile devices yet)
so for now. just use plain old HTML
did that make sense?
No. CSS sucks and is broken. Impossible to do this kind of layout with CSS. Ridiculous that you’d have to target different browsers.
Blogs are very often read by RSS negating any effort spent on formatting in the first place :)
FWIW, I’ve resisted the idea of using an RSS reader that does its own formatting. My RSS reader just gives me links to the posts, and they render in my browser the way they were designed.
I’ve sometimes wondered, though, as I’ve struggled with my own layout issues, how many of my readers ever see the results of that.
As tempting as it is to make a good looking page with CSS (which is more work than they make it out to be, given how crappy almost every browser is at supporting it) I doubt anyone would notice a difference unless you dramatically changed the layout of your page. CSS offers a lot that would make things a lot more simple, especially when it comes to positioning (absolute, relative–pixel, percentage, etc., etc.), but in the long run, sticking to tables is gonna save you a lot of pain.
Oh there IS CSS in this blog – just not the overall formatting. And it’s a question of browsers screwing up support and the lack of CSS editors and the limited documentation of CSS.
I don’t think my layout is very complicated. The trickiest part is having the column-o-menu on the right. Now, maybe it’s just me, but I would like to think that if I can code a Windows application in over 12 different languages, I should be able to get a two-column layout with a fixed-width, right justified 2nd column. Someone on the other post made a comment like “web pages are about artistic style” and that’s true. 100% true. But CSS has naught to do with that: it’s a pseudo-language with a W3C specification!
And even if I *did* get it working on one browser, there’s the problem of different browsers… just like J2ME: sure you can have one code base for all devices but you’ll be extremely limited in what you can do. After the last skitch with CSS I was going to format it all for Lynx. :)
@Dave – I did at first too, but for me it actually helps me scan headlines… formatting is all the same usually with a synopsis in the same font – when I want to see the whole thing, I jump to the site. In some cases it’s no biggie but like a ZDNet or Forbes type site it’s really nice to avoid the frame-of-ads!
You can use CSS successfully to work with all browsers. There however some hacks or tricks you need to apply. Most of the simple stuff works across all browsers, but when you get into margins, padding and floating it starts to get tricky.
This site would be pretty easy to code in HTML/CSS.
I did this site for a client which is effectively a fixed 2-column layout. http://www.divvies.com
The width is fixed not liquid unlike this site.
Peace
Rich