[CLUE-Tech] How do website authors maintain their sanity?

[Jeff Cann]

On Sunday 14 March 2004 10:46 pm, Jed S. Baer wrote:
> For a demonstration of how messy CSS can be for layouts, check this out.

Jed,

I guess my point is that CSS generally solves more problems than it creates, 
particularly with styles.  CSS was designed to solve the problem that HTML 
was not designed to be a sophisticated layout language (it has evolved over 
the years), but still IMHO, it's more complicated to successfully layout a 
complex page in plain-old HTML than if you use CSS.

In addition, I would much rather read a CSS HTML page to figure out where to 
add text than to try and sift through a bunch of <TR><TD> tags to figure out 
where I am supposed to update something.  It's even worse when someone 
created the site (as I have in the past) with a tool like Dreamwear.  [BTW - 
this is now why I do everything by hand or use Quanta].

I've also had the giddy experience of working on HTML which (because of 
layouts) has pixel widths in nested tables to control layout.   The problem 
is that someone needs another row or whatever, and the pixel widths get 
copied around to and fro, causing much more grief than is necessary.  The end 
result is that it can take (literally) hours to fix / update one page.  So, 
IMHO, these types of pages have been a nightmare to maintain or extend 
because one column will be off in size.

I prefer CSS for more complicated layouts because it is easier to read, write 
and maintain.  It's even easier when someone who does not know HTML needs to 
add copy to a page, using the <DIV> tag.   Depending on your needs, nested 
tables are great and I still use them frequently, especially when I do need a 
simple 3 column layout (or whatever).

The biggest problem is that vendors like Microsoft do not fully implement W3C 
specs, so some of the more useful CSS features are unusable if you have a 
wide browser audience for your site.  Did you see this on /. the other day?  
It looks like someone is writing a CSS page to fix a lot of these issues:

 + http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/

Finally, I do think that if you are familiar with HTML, moving to CSS is 
bewildering and takes some time to figure out how things are working.

Later.
Jeff

-- 
http://isuma.org/