Sent by Simon Willison on 19 November 2003 05:05
Dave G wrote:
> I thought this might be a helpful and realistic guide for people
> who are new to CSS. Enjoy!
> <Before you take this as a serious rant, just keep in mind that
> it's tongue in cheek, and may remind some people about what the struggle
> to learn CSS looks like from the start. I've included references just
> because I wanted to feel like I wasn't alone.>
Thanks for an interesting and thought-provoking email. As someone who
has been using CSS extensively for nearly two years it's remarkably easy
to forget quite how much there is to learn, and quite how many gotchas
there are on the way.
Looking through your list of complaints, it seems to me that you could
have been caught out by not completely understanding the structural
markup part of the CSS equation. CSS requires a complete rethink of how
you approach creating web pages. Instead of thinking in terms of what
you need to do to get the page to look how you want it to look, you need
to think (at least initially) purely in terms of how the structure of
the page works. The first step of any CSS design is to identify headers,
paragraphs, lists and logicial page divisions and mark them up using the
cleanest structural markup you can find. Only once you've done that can
you can start applying CSS, initially going a rule at a time and
focusing on individual page elements. This is also when you start adding
any extra markup that you find you need to allow the CSS to work its
magic, always trying to add as little extraneous markup as possible.
This is almost completely at odds with how table based web design works.
In table based designs, you start with the "shape" of the page and work
from the outside in. CSS works from the inside out.
I have no idea if what I've just said is helpful or not. What I do know
is that we as a community are not doing enough to help fellow web
designers join us in CSS nirvana. I'm a member of the Web Standards
project Learn team [ http://webstandards.org/learn/ ] and I've forwarded
your message on to the other team members.
I'm completely confident in CSS, I've used it exclusively for all of my
personal projects for over a year and I've recently started deploying it
on commercial sites as well (such as http://coupons.lawrence.com/ ).
It's not an insurmountable mountain, and if you stick at it you really
will reap the benefits. However, I would not recommend that anyone use
it on a commercial site until they feel confident in what they are
doing. If you aren't completely sure of yourself it can bite you pretty
badly. The same is probably true of table based layouts if you are a
true beginner, but getting sites to work with table based layouts
remains a much more widely understood topic.
--
Simon Willison
Web development weblog: http://simon.incutio.com/
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