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Printing XML: Why CSS Is Better than XSL
An anonymous contributor writes "XML.com just published an article titled Printing XML: Why CSS Is Better than XSL written by Michael Day and Håkon Wium Lie. The article was written in response to Norm Walsh's claim that CSS will never fix [printing]. Did you hear me? CSS will never fix it!. The article shows how a 100-line CSS style sheet gives you the same formatted version of W3C's Webarch as the 1000-line XSL style sheet by using Prince."
It's not the IT community that is trying to do that, it's the idiot with the Apple computer and a copy of Frontpage or Flash whatever.
They want total control over what the users sees, and can't understand that someone might have a monitor running a different resolution than theirs, or that the person might want to view the data 30 years from now on a completely different display technology.
In other words, it's idiot Mac fags who care more about the artistic look of the page than actually conveying data.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Having been at the very least an HTML tinkerer since 1996, and also having parlayed a hobby into a career, I've spent a lot of time with cross browser compatability. In 2002, I learned a whole new level of cross browser grilling when I went to work for an ad agency with clients such as Dell, HP, 3M, etc.
My message to web developers is this:
For the love of God, stop using CSS for anything more than text formatting. Outside of that, not much else is 100% cross browser compatible, and I define 100% cross browser compatible as being more than vaguely similar from one browser to the next. Certain things like spacing and borders when defined in CSS get rendered differently from one browser to the next. I don't care if it looks great in IE or Mozilla. It should look great in both.
Until the browsers converge on CSS, (which is great in theory) please use nested tables for your layouts. They work great all the way back to Netscape 4, which is all you can ask for these days.
What I do for a living now, is even more dependent on other people writing clean, well commented, cross-browser code than the last job. I take websites for non-profits and put them into a CMS with an emphasis on preserving the look of their original site. Since the pages get split up into itty bitty pieces and put into a generic CMS that must cater to most types of site designs, I've lowered my tollerance for bad HTML and shoehorning designs into CSS.