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CSS Turns 10 Years Old
An anonymous reader writes "Cascading Style Sheets celebrate their tenth anniversary this week. The W3C put together the CSS10 site in recognition of this milestone with a Hall of Fame, essays from the past decade, a gallery, and more." I was glad to see the CSS Zen Garden selected for the Hall of Fame, and disappointed (but not surprised) that no browser on my computer correctly renders the Acid2 test.
I don't know if we should give browsers any slack just because CSS2 is "only 8.5 years old". It's pretty poor IMO that a widespread standard such as CSS 2.0 still isn't implemented fully by any browser.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
... and still no "height=100% of parent container" either. We're still forced to do either javascript and/or visual hacks to make two columns of the same height with dynamic content inside each column.
This outlines the problem. Safari has been "Fixed" so that the acid2 test renders correctly, yet still contains lots of rendering bugs. I would have to say as a web developer that I run into many more rendering bugs on Safari than I do on Firefox (although IE is the worst). I can probably code a browser that correctly renders the acid 2 test in 3 days. It won't render any other pages properly, but it will render the acid2 test.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
This nicely demonstrates the fact that Acid2 is not a CSS compliance test (something which I've seen claimed in many discussions). If Opera 9 and Safari 2 can both pass Acid2, but Opera 9 has broader and/or less buggy CSS support, then Acid2 cannot tell you the overall level of compliance.
It's important to remember what Acid2 is: namely, a wish list for web developers. It's a bunch of features that developers would like to use, but which had (until recently) limited, buggy, or just plain no support in major browsers. The prestige of passing Acid2 (and, conversely, the shame of not passing it) was supposed to motivate browser developers to essentially fill in the corners of their CSS support, making it feasible for web developers to start using more of their toolboxes.
It's taken time, but it's succeeded, with one notable "we don't care, we don't have to" exception: Internet Explorer. Of the four major engines, KHTML and Opera have it, and Gecko is getting it soon. And the biggest player on the block seems to be doing its best to prevent us from actually using our tools if we want the majority of web surfers to see our sites as designed.
Hey, and maybe in another ten years we'll have a position system that works reliably across browsers and can survive the window being resized, the dpi being changed, or the font being enlarged. Other than tables I mean.
I did the CSS -showcase thing a few months ago and about 10% of the layouts by the CSS Masters of the Universe fit the above criteria. It may not be impossible, but the bar's too high.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
They have yet to convince me just how they are going to make the table obsolete, every time you turn a corner you are hearing from CSS users (including myself) the end of the table is near, don't use the table, I think the real question ought to be why not use the table, besides the lag, the complications with non css table layouts actually tend to go down in my experience. Yes I could spend 2 days figuring out why the div layout is being difficult and use CSS hacks to make it cross browser, but in the long run the div/css layout has a lot to work on before you see it being adopted as anything more than a side note for those who want to show off their skills. Right now CSS because of its major lack of vertical control is far less stable than the table structure, yes we are told you should burn in hell for even thinking of using tables, but on the end note it works, and quite frankly If I am going to get more stable results at the the price of not promoting the great CSS, than I can get over it. I am glad CSS has had 10 years and a congratulations are in order for them, but please if you are going to promise the end of an era or style try to make sure you can back it up with proof like the decline of nearly every major dynamic web software relying on tables to ensure stability (with CMS's trying to move to the div, the BBS stuck in a rut because css/divs just don't seem to help do them well
Did someone say cake?
The artists DID have control for a dark time in the mid-to-late 1990s, when the Internet bubble was in the earliest stages of inflation. I like to call it the "JPEG Jigsaw Puzzle Age" of the WWW.
While I think that CSS is far from perfect (it WAS, ironically enough, inspired by a concept from Microsoft after all) I do in fact find a properly-written CSS-formatted HTML page much EASIER to follow. Back in the dark JPEG Jigsaw Puzzle age, when trying to view or parse HTML source, it was cluttered with FONT-this and IMG SRC="spacer.gif"-that and TABLEs inside TABLEs inside TABLEs containing image maps. It was absolutely DREADFUL. And no, nested DIVs are NOT the same as nested tables, because tables have rows and columns and are meant for TABULAR DATA--NOT for general structuring of content. DIVs get no more complicated (from a content perspective) than simple nesting, whereas TABLEs have specialised TR collections within them, which in turn have TDs...and COLSPAN and ROWSPAN even further complicate and confuse when used for layout purposes.
CSS is more than a formatting tool--it enables content and presentation separation as well as semantic web design. The web would be beautiful but completely unusable GARBAGE if artists were in "full control". Similarly, the web would be efficient and powereful, but ugly and arcane if programmers were in "full control" (that is, we'd probably still be messing with Gopher, Archie, WAIS or similar powerful but ugly and/or user-unfriendly systems). If the artists and programmers could cooperate properly (and development tools that make use of CSS and HTML standards more effectively enabled such cooperation perhaps) then we get balance between effective presentation and functionality.
I suppose the biggest problem with CSS, beyond inconsistent interpretation of CSS by various browsers (which isn't CSS' fault) is that it is far too easy to mis-use it, and most CSS isn't properly or effectively used (probably because artists are trying to control it
A properly designed XHTML-and-CSS page is absolutely beautiful to behold: It is attractive yet simple to navigate. It is accessible (it degrades gracefully in audio and text-only browsers, and there is no need for "printer-friendly" links--ever--so get rid of them--NOW). It is easy to manage (don't like the way it looks just change the CSS, and if you need to update the content you can do so in the XHTML with virtually no effect on presentation). It is easy to parse and very human-readable (if you properly name your elements that is--use id="navigationMenu" instead of "toprightblock" and class="articleName" instead of "bigboldblue"). Without all that TABLE/TD/TR/IMG SRC="spacer.gif"/FONT/blah blah clutter in the HTML you can easily see the document structure, links, etc...and without all the
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Sorry...had to get this out...sometimes I can't resist a troll...