Ok, when I learned how to make web pages, I learned HTML. There was a lot you could do with HTML. I learned that if you want to put anything in a specific place on the page, you use tables. Table can nest and you can set them to specific sizes, giving you a fair amount of control over the design of your page. However, there were lots of things HTML could not do, such as really specify the size of text on a user’s screen. That was ultimately decided by the user’s browser. This is infuriating for a designer. If you can not control how something as simple as text is going to look, then design is haphazard at best.

You could control things by making images of stuff and then slicing them up. This seemed like a viable workaround for a while, but it is bandwidth heavy, difficult and awkward to update or change, and useless for bodies of text.

Then came the magical CSS. Wonder of wonders, you could actually sepcify line height! I had always hated that “single spaced” look of text on the web. Not enough white space! Not enough breathing room for text. It was rather ugly in any browser on any system. I sat down to do the tutorial on CSS sometime in 2000 and what I found is that because of the browser wars between then Netscape and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, there were more exceptions than rules being followed. Crestfallen, I went back to my nested tables and continued to work around HTML.

Now, however, CSS has come a long way. Browsers have come a long way. Internet Explorer still stubbornly resists following standards, but it follows them a lot more now than it used to. Now CSS is really the way to go in web design. Anyone relying heavily on tables still is not a real designer. There is little need to bend and twist HTML into web sites that are difficult to update and contain a lot of superfluous code. This web site is designed with CSS as are any others that I am designing now. I am still learning how to master it, but it is not too hard, really. Not any worse than beating tables into submission. For a really good demonstration of how CSS can transform a page, check out this live design and also CSS Zen Garden

This entry was posted on Friday, February 24th, 2006 at 11:35 am and is filed under Ideas, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.