CSS is the crowbar that enables the Web to get through the design-process doorway.
Coincidentally, I spent an entire evening bashing my head against a stupid CSS problem last night. It’s antithetical to everything I’ve been taught about programming, and I really hope we have something better than the HTML/CSS/JS hodgepodge in the future. (I ended up Googling “CSS sucks” and spent a good while reading the comments on this article: http://www.raizlabs.com/graiz/2006/09/25/ten-reasons-why-css-sucks/ )
Happy birthday anyway because a web is still so much better than no web.
CSS is not programming — it’s publishing. Don’t expect it to work like programming because it does not — it works like print stylesheets and other publishing legacy.
HTML, CSS, and JS don’t matter in and of themselves — it is the DOM that matters. You can build a DOM tree with HTML and then access all of those objects and their properties through JavaScript. No CSS required at all if you don’t want to use it. The CSS stylesheet is literally only there for non-programmers (designers and other publishing people) who can’t program. I always use very basic, simple, minimalist CSS stylesheets that work in every browser and are very, very easy to maintain, and then I use JavaScript to do more advanced stuff, because you can detect objects to make your stuff more robust, and use variables to make development and maintenance much easier. I worked on a site once that had about 20 really, really long stylesheets and nobody could get them working right because there were all sorts of conflicts and overrides. We redid it so that it had 1 medium-size CSS stylesheet and 1 medium-size JS script that accomplished the producer’s goals and were really easy to read and maintain.
You might want to check out the book “DOM Scripting” by Jeremy Keith. It has really great examples of how to do advanced styling (and interactivity) with JavaScript. I had been writing JavaScript for years before I read DOM Scripting, but after I read it, I finally felt like I knew what JavaScript was for. It has a very document-centric approach to JavaScript rather than treating it like a baby C for general-purpose programming, and it really opens your mind up to moving functionality from CSS over to JavaScript where it will work better and be easier to maintain.
CSS is the crowbar that enables the Web to get through the design-process doorway.
Coincidentally, I spent an entire evening bashing my head against a stupid CSS problem last night. It’s antithetical to everything I’ve been taught about programming, and I really hope we have something better than the HTML/CSS/JS hodgepodge in the future. (I ended up Googling “CSS sucks” and spent a good while reading the comments on this article: http://www.raizlabs.com/graiz/2006/09/25/ten-reasons-why-css-sucks/ )
Happy birthday anyway because a web is still so much better than no web.
CSS is not programming — it’s publishing. Don’t expect it to work like programming because it does not — it works like print stylesheets and other publishing legacy.
HTML, CSS, and JS don’t matter in and of themselves — it is the DOM that matters. You can build a DOM tree with HTML and then access all of those objects and their properties through JavaScript. No CSS required at all if you don’t want to use it. The CSS stylesheet is literally only there for non-programmers (designers and other publishing people) who can’t program. I always use very basic, simple, minimalist CSS stylesheets that work in every browser and are very, very easy to maintain, and then I use JavaScript to do more advanced stuff, because you can detect objects to make your stuff more robust, and use variables to make development and maintenance much easier. I worked on a site once that had about 20 really, really long stylesheets and nobody could get them working right because there were all sorts of conflicts and overrides. We redid it so that it had 1 medium-size CSS stylesheet and 1 medium-size JS script that accomplished the producer’s goals and were really easy to read and maintain.
You might want to check out the book “DOM Scripting” by Jeremy Keith. It has really great examples of how to do advanced styling (and interactivity) with JavaScript. I had been writing JavaScript for years before I read DOM Scripting, but after I read it, I finally felt like I knew what JavaScript was for. It has a very document-centric approach to JavaScript rather than treating it like a baby C for general-purpose programming, and it really opens your mind up to moving functionality from CSS over to JavaScript where it will work better and be easier to maintain.