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According to Dvorak, CSS doesn't work

Today Slashdot featured an article written by respected / hated tech-expert John Dvorak in which he states the problems with CSS. He goes so far as to state the following:

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?


Wow! CSS doesn't work?! Wait a minute, let me keep on reading.

Oh! This rant article is based on his own frustration when he attempted to redesign his blog! Amazing. He can't find an easy way to design the layout he wants for all browsers with CSS and suddendly the technology is dying and it doesn't work. He doesn't even consider the possibility that he just didn't get it!

He mentions cascading/inheritance properties of CSS to be a bad thing? It's actually one of the most powerful features of CSS in the first place! You just have to understand it and learn how to use it for your advantage. It's exactly the same as someone saying Java's inheritance and polymorphism suck because they're complicated or tricky!! Sometimes you are going to have to sit down and actually learn something. And then you're going to have to practice, and then you'll learn how to use it more effectively, over time.

All of this stems from the fact that the Web has always enabled anyone to create a webpage without understanding the technology below – regardless of the result. You grab Frontpage or Dreamweaver and you create a page. Nice. But that doesn't mean everyone should be able to grasp advanced concepts of CSS, specially if your aim is crossbrowser compatibility.

It was never easy to make one site look exactly the same in every browser. Ever since Internet Explorer 2.0 there has been inconsistencies between IE and Netscape – remember Netscape? – and it's hard to ensure that everyone implements the standards exactly in the same way. Designing for crossbrowser compatibility is hard and the best way to make it easier is for browser vendors to get their act together and improve their support of the standard. Not strike it off the map!

Please note that I'm not saying it shouldn't be easier, we all know how much frustration IE6 bring into the world of webdesign, but don't blame the entire community for that!

Dvorak, as always, manages to make silly remarks on a subject he knows little about. Sad.

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