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Opera's Haakon Wium Lie On CSS, Web Standards, and More
mikemuch writes "The standard that eventually became CSS was originally submitted to Tim Berners-Lee et al by Haakon Wium Lie, who continues to have new ideas for the web formatting language. The latest proposal from the current CTO of Opera Software is the CSS Generated Content for Paged Media Module. Lie sat down with PCMag to discuss not only this scrollbar-free browsing initiative, but a wider range of Web topics, including thoughts on powers like Apple and Google. A teaser from the story: 'At Opera, we sometimes wake up in the morning and see a new Google service that could have been optimized if we could have worked with them in the development phase. It seems they're more eager to put out things and see what sticks.'"
And CSS does it. You can set e.g. background images for a class or id from CSS, so you can change the graphic appearance of a header or footer from one central CSS file. I'd really suggest reading a rigorous introduction to CSS, or something like O'Reilly's CSS Cookbook that walk you through how to accomplish some specific task. If you don't even know the language, don't blame it for not being useful for you!
I also recommend the poster look at an example of how just changing the CSS can dramatically change the appearance of the size: CSS Zen Garden. Their HTML has maybe a few too many divs and spans (they did this to make it easier for designers to apply new styles) but it's a great demonstration of what CSS can do for you.
That's all good and well, but I think the point GP was making - in jest or not - is that CSS is still at the whim of the structure presented by the HTML.
For example, if your header has a single div, you can use CSS all you want but you're not going to get 4 separate texts in each of the corners of that div (actually might be possible, but no cheating by using js)
Thus the reason that the CSS Zen Garden website works as well as it does is not just because of CSS, but because the structure is well thought out as well.
So what GP is saying is very much true. You'd still want to keep your headers and footers and many other things in separate files that can easily be included by a great many other pages, so that you need only update that included file to adjust all those other pages' results.
And, in a way, that might make some think "well then I don't need CSS if I only need to update that single file.. why specify styling attributes for the header when I can adjust them in the header include file itself?".
But they then miss that headers often share visual aspects with the rest of the page. A background color change, for example, might be simple enough by editing your header, sidebar, content and footer pages.. but even simpler still is editing the CSS that governs all four.
CSS wasn't meant to make structure organized, just style (which does include positioning, but I'm wishfully thinking GP wasn't referring to that) - in effect, exactly what he's saying.. separating content from presentation - but that presentation still relies on the structure that may or may not be considered part of the content.
Safari isn't "further down" for OS X users. It's the default browser for Macs, IE is non-existant and Firefox on OS X has been a joke for quite some time (memory hungry, extremely slow to start). The only real options for browsing on a Mac are Safari, Chrome and Opera, with Firefox in a distant fourth.
In any case, Safari and Chrome both use Webkit, which powers Apple Safari and Google Chrome. By August 2011 they held nearly 30% of desktop browser market share between them.