A rant against CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)

[mandy]

The idea behind CSS is a good one. With HTML, Web pages can become monstrosities of content and formatting information. To change the look of a site, you have to sift through the content to redo a lot of detailed information. It's painful. CSS was designed to separate the content from the formatting, so that when you want to change your site's look and feel, you simply change the formatting information.

CSS's real benefit was that the layout not only could be changed easily but also could become dynamic: The content is stored in a database and presented as necessary, with instant updates. With dynamic content, it's possible for 100 people to go to the same Web site and get 100 different versions.

Here is where a great idea begins to fall apart. And it does so progressively, worsening over time as "improvements" are made...

full article: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1987181,00.asp

[PG :o}]

The author said,

That's not the worst thing. You can live with the basic cascading mess; it's a matter of debugging. The real problem is that no two browsers—let alone no two versions of any one browser—interpret CSS the same way! The Microsoft browser interprets a style sheet one way, Firefox interprets it another way, and Opera a third way. Can someone explain to me exactly what kind of "standard" CSS is, anyway?

He's correct, but he's wrong. It's Microslop's fault. IE is not compliant with the rules of CSS. All the little extra crappity craps that people put into their CSS just for IE users just furthers the problem. It's like enabling. It's like giving your bratty toddler a cookie to shut him up, instead of talking to him about his behavior. If web designers would stop coddling IE, IE users would abandon ship. IMO.

Yes, I saw this:

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but I decided to post anyway. Anybody out there agree with me? Disagree?

[BellisimaJ.]

PG,

I know very little about CSS. I do know that I hate it!!! I much prefer HTML----it just seems so much easier and cleaner to me.