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?!

It's not so bad

[Toreo asesino]

CSS is only truly painful when the style-sheet is too vague. I find that it's actually browser assumptions on positioning and margins tend to be the biggest killers, but by using absolute values for these settings generally give the same results across all browsers.

Oh, and there are of course the IE-specific CSS bugs to bear in mind too - http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer.html [positioniseverything.net]

This chart about sums it up..

[Anonymous Coward]

Time Breakdown of Modern Web Design [caenstaff.com]

Re:What's the alternative?

[jfengel]

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."
 

Blame Internet Explorer

[Nurgled]

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 [w3.org], 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.

Re:Dvorak

[dzelenka]

The poor souls that don't have their threshold at -1 will totally miss this humorous gem!

Re:What's the alternative?

[Siward]

Gawd, finally someone who seems to understand that the W3C can't actually enforce standards on companies who write software. The W3C isn't a government agency, they don't have law-enforcing power on the Internet, and they post guidelines for the love of god. How is it that so many computer literate people blame the W3C's CSS guidelines for the problems created by different implementations of not-quite W3C standards?

And I thought Slashdot comments were frustrating to read on a normal article...

Re:Experts should be optional

[massysett]

Meh. Experts are optional. You don't have to use CSS. The HTML you taught your grandfather years ago will still work just fine. The HTML I learned over five years ago in college, using NCSA's tutorial, will still work fine.

You don't need that xmlns declaration at the top of the webpage. Yeah, you need it to validate the page--but only programmers care about that. The browser won't shut down if you don't have it.

Programmers have taken over, but an amateur can still do a basic web page or even a complex one with a little study. It took me a couple of weeks of spare time to put together some basic CSS that's enough for my needs.

Re:Two problems

[dubl-u]

Meanwhile, this article is basically Dvorak saying, "Man. Programming is HARD. It has to be a problem with the language."

Yeah, I had the crazy notion that technology writers should have some vague understanding of technology. He wrote "If your Internet connection happens to lose a bit of CSS data, you get a mess on your screen." I guess this is the Ted Stevens "leaky tubes" model of internet plumbing. I presume that Dvorak weekly mops under his cable modem to keep leaking bits from staining his floor. (But he's no fool; it's only the one bits he's worried about: the zero bits are round and so don't slip out of tiny holes as easily.)

Browsers and Standard to blame

[twistedfuck]

Besides the poor implmentation of the browser makers of the CSS standard, the standard itself has plenty of flaws or omissions. Even people with quite a bit of experience creating web pages have trouble using CSS for certain layouts, this speaks to the basics of CSS. No wonder people have been pissed off at the W3C, their standards are lacking and they can't get proper industry-wide implementation of them.

Re:Standard versus Proprietary?

[MilwaukeeCharlie]

For me, all Flash sites look exactly the same: Click here to download plugin.

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 [mozdev.org] as well.

Wish granted

[metamatic]

We also need a decent video format that is cross platform for streaming.

MPEG-4.

Re:Two problems

[ars]

'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/ [edwards.name]

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.

Re:Standard versus Proprietary?

[Seraphim_72]

<div style=" height:auto; margin-top:25%; margin-bottom:25%;">
<img src="apache_pb22_ani.gif" />
</div>

Works under IE6 and FF1.5

Re:Blame Internet Explorer

[gullevek]

If you are a typeset guy and come from printing, say goodbye to the same everywhere in the internet. I can overrule your layout with a local style on my computer. You want it to look the same everywhere. create a JPEG and put it online.