Does CSS Suck?

[Bill Norton]

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.

Someone suggested that some of you folks might have a thing or two to say
about the topic, so I'm inviting everyone to drop by and give their
thoughts.

May I suggest that you not spend too much effort or attention on the Dvorak
article per se, since it's one of the more poorly written posts.

The upshot of it all is that there seem to be a lot of people - myself
included - who feel that CSS is seriously flawed, maybe even fatally flawed.
I'd like to hear your thoughts on it.

[Spartanicus]

Jack <mr*********@no spam.jackpot.uk .netwrote:

>Like most discussions on web fora the quality of the discussion is
poor, I gave up after reading a few pages.

It's regrettable that web-forums (sick) have steadily become more and
more difficult to discriminate from newsfroups; Google is not solely
responsible for this, by any means. But they are by far the biggest
hijacker of froups.

In referring to web fora I (probably mistakenly) did not intend for
Google Groups to be included amongst those.

Some of us, myself included have taken counter measures by filtering out
all posts originating from Google Groups. In addition I also filter out
the direct follow-ups to these posts. This significantly reduces the
noise in newsgroups.

--
Spartanicus

[Andy Dingley]

Bill Norton wrote:

May I suggest that you not spend too much effort or attention on the Dvorak
article per se,

It's as Bismark said about politics and sausages. I used to read PC
mags avidly, then I wrote for them (PC Mag). Since then I've stopped
buying them.

since it's one of the more poorly written posts.

Is Dvorak's space opera any good?

The upshot of it all is that there seem to be a lot of people - myself
included - who feel that CSS is seriously flawed, maybe even fatally flawed.

CSS is fine. Implementations of it used to be poor. Training and
knowledge of it is still abyssmal.

It's funny how the people who understand CSS manage to produce good
work with it, and the people who claim it's "broken" itself can't. Of
course it's never _their_ fault.

[Harlan Messinger]

Jack wrote:

Spartanicus wrote:

>>
Like most discussions on web fora the quality of the discussion is
poor, I gave up after reading a few pages.

It's regrettable that web-forums (sick)

"Sick"?

[Harlan Messinger]

Bill Norton wrote:

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.

Someone suggested that some of you folks might have a thing or two to say
about the topic, so I'm inviting everyone to drop by and give their
thoughts.

May I suggest that you not spend too much effort or attention on the Dvorak
article per se, since it's one of the more poorly written posts.

The upshot of it all is that there seem to be a lot of people - myself
included - who feel that CSS is seriously flawed, maybe even fatally flawed.
I'd like to hear your thoughts on it.

My thought is that the pervasive use of CSS across the Web squarely
contradicts Dvorak's claim that it is "fatally flawed" and calls into
question the value of any other pronouncement he might make on the subject.

[TomB]

axlq wrote:

CSS isn't flawed, and it doesn't suck. What sucks is Microsoft's
implementation of it. That alone is *the* cause of *my* grief
concerning CSS. If nobody ever used IE for browsing again, CSS
would be a beautiful thing to use. But with IE around, it becomes a
mess of ugly hacks.

Then don't use the hacks. Ignore the fact that IE users can't see your
page properly. If everyone would do that, eventually people will get
sick and tired of that shitty piece of software and use the
alternatives.

What a wonderful world :-)

[Matt]

On Mon, 31 Jul 2006 08:40:43 -0400, Harlan Messinger wrote:

Jack wrote:

>Spartanicus wrote:

>>>
Like most discussions on web fora the quality of the discussion is
poor, I gave up after reading a few pages.

It's regrettable that web-forums (sick)

"Sick"?

I think he meant "sic" (TICBW).

From Wikipedia:
| Sic is a Latin word meaning "thus", "so", or "just as that". In writing,
| it is italicized and placed within square brackets — [sic] — to
| indicate that an incorrect or unusual spelling, phrase, or other
| preceding quoted material is a verbatim reproduction of the quoted
| original and is not a transcription error.

The plural of "forum" is either "fora" or "forums", Jack clearly prefers
"fora".

--
Matt

[axlq]

In article <11************ **********@i42g 2000cwa.googleg roups.com>,
TomB <to************ *@gmail.comwrot e:

>CSS isn't flawed, and it doesn't suck. What sucks is Microsoft's
implementati on of it. That alone is *the* cause of *my* grief
concerning CSS. If nobody ever used IE for browsing again, CSS
would be a beautiful thing to use. But with IE around, it becomes a
mess of ugly hacks.

Then don't use the hacks.

I generally don't, except for explicitly setting line-height in some
containers to get around the peekaboo bug. That, at least, causes
no pollution in my stylesheet, and won't have any consequences when
a new, better version of IE comes out.

>Ignore the fact that IE users can't see your page properly.

I do. For example, I have CSS tabs with drop-down menus (no
javascript). Anyone can click on a tab to view a page with the menu
choices, but only non-IE users see the drop-down menus on the tabs
themselves.

I try to make things degrade gracefully for IE. But Microsoft is
not paying me to work around their bugs, so I try to avoid it.

>If everyone would do that, eventually people will get sick and
tired of that shitty piece of software and use the alternatives.

No, I think people simply wouldn't be aware of what they're
missing unless they tried the alternatives. And as long as IE
comes with Windows, there's little incentive for anyone but the
technically-inclined to switch.

-A

[Harlan Messinger]

Matt wrote:

On Mon, 31 Jul 2006 08:40:43 -0400, Harlan Messinger wrote:

>Jack wrote:

>>Spartanicus wrote:
Like most discussions on web fora the quality of the discussion is
poor, I gave up after reading a few pages.
It's regrettable that web-forums (sick)

"Sick"?

I think he meant "sic" (TICBW).

I know, and I don't normally correct people's usage on Usenet, but it
was just ironic after he had taken it upon himself to edit "fora", and
on because top of that he was misusing "sic" anyway, as the definition
below corroborates. It's used to notify the reader that the error
preserved in the copy existed in the original, not that the copy is a
correction.

From Wikipedia:
| Sic is a Latin word meaning "thus", "so", or "just as that". In writing,
| it is italicized and placed within square brackets — [sic] — to
| indicate that an incorrect or unusual spelling, phrase, or other
| preceding quoted material is a verbatim reproduction of the quoted
| original and is not a transcription error.

The plural of "forum" is either "fora" or "forums", Jack clearly prefers
"fora".

[Wes Groleau]

Bill Norton wrote:

Well, OK. I guess I was expecting a little more in the way of substance than
this.

"Does it suck? Is it flawed?" has substance?

--
Wes Groleau
"Grant me the serenity to accept those I cannot change;
the courage to change the one I can;
and the wisdom to know it's me."
-- unknown

[Wes Groleau]

TomB wrote:

Then don't use the hacks. Ignore the fact that IE users can't see your
page properly. If everyone would do that, eventually people will get
sick and tired of that shitty piece of software and use the
alternatives.

Nice theory, but the said fact is that the people
who hack and hack until their stuff looks good on
IE with a T1 connection and never notice that it
looks like crap and/or loads like molasses
everywhere else outnumber the folks that know what
they're doing. Since Joe Public doesn't know any
better, he/she assumes that the "looking like crap"
is that fault of all those other browsers.

And if you are in the minority that refuses to cater
to IE's bugs, the general public assumes your website
is crap, never knowing it's their browser. After all,
other sites look good in IE.

--
Wes Groleau

There ain't no right wing,
there ain't no left wing.
There's only you and me and we just disagree.
(apologies to Jim Krueger)