Bill Norton schrieb:
Over at PCMag.com there is a debate going on over the usability of CSS. The
discussion was initiated by an article by John Dvorak called "Why CSS Bugs
Me" (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1987181,00.asp). The discussion
starts here:
http://discuss.pcmag.com/forums/1/10...spx#1004331343.
It is an easy and cheap journalist method to present oneself as kind of
a rebel by writing "xxx sucks and I am the only one who dares to say the
truth", and thus get a bunch of pro and contra reactions. The result is
an annoyingly boring discussion with mostly religion-like statements, as
the example shows.
Now here's my point of view: The core idea of CSS is brilliant. Today's
real world appearance of it shows some flaws, some of the most serious
ones are IMO:
1. Not solved problems of screen representation:
- The lack of an overall applicable and consistent unit for screen
representation (as the em value is context dependent)
- The lack of consistent image scaling (technically limited by the
impossibility of acceptable rendering of scaled low-res images;
standards- resp. implementation-limited by the absence of background
scaling)
- Box model problems, which will hopefully be solved with the
availability of the box-sizing property (defining an element with a 2px
border, 1em padding and total width of 60% is impossible; there is not
even a consistent rendering of a text field and a select element with
the same width, border and padding applied)
2. Browser implementations
- Poor implementation of CSS in quite popular browsers, as well known in
this group
- Long lifetime of browser versions makes CSS development very slow. If
today a perfect Internet Explorer would be published, we will still have
to code for IE6 in 5 or 10 years.
3. User understanding
- Clients and sometimes also authors expect CSS to make their site look
identical in every situation, instead of appropriately different in
every situation.
- Designers often design for their own screen as if it was a piece of paper.
Now the presence of this kind of flaws is not surprising, as the
development of CSS is community-driven and influenced by a variety of
stakeholders, such as the W3C, browser manufacturers, authors, authors'
clients, users. This kind of project develops slowly by nature, and it
develops also by people discussing their needs in this group, or posting
suggestions to the W3C, but not by general "CSS sucks" statements.
The alternative to CSS would be a proprietary software developed by one
company. This is actually available - anybody feeling uncomfortable with
CSS can use Flash or PDF to gain total control over the appearance of
his/her informations. I am sure the same person would post a "Why Flash
bugs me" or "Why PDF bugs me" article shortly.
--
Markus