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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.
meechwings on wed, 19 jul 2006 23:08
However, he does seem to be a bit of a curmuddgeon (hey, where's the spell check button :P ?). And security, not Web 2.0 (or the web in general), seems to be his strong suit.
Mario on thu, 20 jul 2006 06:46
jcraveiro on thu, 20 jul 2006 08:08
And you managed to use something I was going to use too: "saying that cascading properties of CSS are bad because you just don't get them is like (...insert comparison to another language...)." :D I guess it isn't CSS's blame that Dvorak wasn't as kind as to RTFM.
andr3 on thu, 20 jul 2006 18:55
It's a pain in the ass when you're expected to produce X articles per week about technology; You're bound to run into problems when you approach some issue you're not an expert on. If he's not an expert on CSS, then why would he have to go on talking nonsense for? I guess it's his ego that fills him with confidence to say whatever passes through that mind of his. And the thing is that we, the community, actually read what he writes. That's because it's not all bad. Most of the times he hits the nail right in the head, but sometimes..... geeez.
@Joao:
Oh, my... I didn't mean to steal you anything. Besides, we're allowed to make a post on the same subject. I reckon you have a lot more readers than I do, so why refrain yourself from posting some of your opinions just because I have done so? :) Go ahead, I'll be right below commenting your post. :P
matt on mon, 28 jan 2008 09:06
Let's talk about debugging it. GUI builders make it easy to create lots of HTML tables and DIV's to get the content positioned. You think I want to trace some CSS inheritance (typically to find a bug caused by unwanted CSS inheritance) through all that?
No, I think that it's all the web site fiddlers who "just don't get it".
andr3 on mon, 28 jan 2008 09:30
When you stated your own background, I could have easily guessed the rest of your comment. We don't want a language to be suitable for every fields of our dear industry. For the web, the way CSS works, is ideal. When you argue that the code created by WYSIWYG editors is hard to debug, blame it on the tools, not the language.
When we/they say people like Dvorak don't get it, is because they don't give it much thought. I believe they also expect it to be simple and straight-forward, which it isn't. It requires quite a good deal of study to understand how to work the cascading aspect to your (developer) advantage.
Yes, I admit that a good part of our work is dealing with browser inconsistencies, things people work in AWT, Flash, don't have to deal with (and if I may, that's the challenging part aka the fun part). But for that, you have to knock on browser vendors' doors. Not the language spec'ers.
If you want, I'll meet you half the way. The language works and it's the whole different aspects of it (including cascading) that make it work, what we lack is showing people CSS is more than copy/pasting code from one site to another, GUI/WYSIWYG editors will never work as good as hand-written code (you could use a framework) and also that some debug tools should be made even more tied to the language, so that debugging is made easier.
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