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Dvorak Rants on CSS
John Dvorak writes on CSS after working on redesigning his weblog, the article ended up being extremely funny. From the write-up:
As we move into the age of Vista, multimedia's domination on the desktop, and Web sites controlled by cascading style sheets running under improved browsers, when will someone wake up and figure out that none of this stuff works at all?!
On the font-weight vs. text-decoration distinction, CSS is inheriting the terminology from typesetters and type designers. Technically, "Times Roman" and "Helvetica" designate "typefaces". "Times Roman Bold" and "Helvetica Italic" are "fonts". It's a property of the design itself; the bold and italic aren't simply automatically-derived versions of the typeface but require an artist to sit down and design them separately. (Some even incorporate the size; Times Roman 24 isn't always just a zoomed-out version of Times Roman 12).
(It gets even more complicated with the notion of "font families", but I don't understand the distinction there, either.)
Underlining, on the other hand, is just something you do to it; there isn't any "Times Roman Underlined". That makes it a property of the text, not of the font or face. You don't need a designer to add it.
It sucks that you need such details to do something that you get just by pushing a button in every WYSIWIG word processor in the world. What we need, and what I haven't seen yet, is a WYSIWIG designer for CSS. I envision something equivalent to what Word and OpenOffice call "character styles", but frankly most people don't use them even when they're available.
And Word/OpenOffice still lack (for the most part) an equivalent of CSS layout, which is the part I still find hard. As you point out, CSS's box model seems to be missing some really basic ideas, and that causes many people to just say, "This is 300 pixels wide and it looks fine at a font size I'm comfortable reading and I don't want to f*** with it any more."
If you want to complain, complain about Internet Explorer. Mozilla, Opera and (as far as I know) Safari all support the CSS table rendering model, which can do almost everything that HTML tables can. The main thing it lacks is support for colspan and rowspan, but for your average website layout (banner across the top and one or maybe two sidebars beside the content) you can get away without using either.
Of course, Internet Explorer only supports the bare minimum of the stuff in that chapter, and even then only when applied to HTML tables. Nor does Microsoft plan to support it in the near future. Most people don't even know that CSS can do table rendering because of Microsoft's lack of support, but the truth is that for all of CSS's warts, simple table-based layouts are actually right there in the CSS2 spec and will work just fine in every modern browser except Microsoft's.
For me, all Flash sites look exactly the same, too: a little clickable "Play" arrow. If I want the content, I click it; I leave it blocked if (as in most cases) it's an advertisement.
You didn't tell us what browser you use, but if it's in the Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox family, go ahead and download the Flash plugin you've been resisting, and then this Flash Block plugin as well.[[Jdapnc. O,..y (Nuts...keyboard stuck in Dvorak mode again.)
'Don't worry, IE7 will solve all of your problems."
Well, actually it does. Except I'm talking about this IE7: http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/
I installed that, and suddenly I was able to write standard css, and not go crazy trying to make IE work.
It's actually quite wonderful. I don't know why Microsoft can't aford to fix it's own bugs, and needs other people to do it for them, but hey, at least it works.
-Ariel