RE: [TCLUG:16337] CSS and all that (was Personal Request..)

["Eric Hillman" <ehillman@cccu.com>]

> >> simpler is better anyway. Stick with
> >> HTML 2.0, I say. :)
>         yeah, that's what I'm thinking as well.
>         especially after the abominably *bad* examples of CSS & JavaScript
> I've seen lately. :(
>
> >Actually, if you do CSS for the layout and take the design away from the
> >content, you can create excrutiatingly simple html, that looks great on
> >new browsers :)
>
> _new_ browsers = IE5?


Unfortunately, IE5 is *much* closer (in my experience) to W3C-standard DHTML
than Netscape.  Sure, they've both got weird idiosyncracies like "BLINK" or
"MARQUEE", and nigh-completely incompatible implementations of DOM, but if you
write straight by-the-RFC HTML 3.2, I'll bet even money that IE5 renders the
page better than Netscape 4.7x (I haven't had a chance to try out Netscape 6 --
although, from all the bitching I've heard about the interface, it may be some
time before I bother)

However, an intelligent application of CSS & JavaScript can produce results that
look good in almost any browser.  By taking all the complex formatting stuff out
of the tags, and not having to rely on invisible tables every time you want to
do positioning more complex than "align=center", you get a page that looks great
on browsers that support the bells and whistles, yet doesn't completely turn to
mush in Lynx.

If I may make so bold, the design of our website (http://www.cccu.com) is a good
illustration of what I'm talking about.  Ordinarily, I'm allergic to both frames
& JavaScript, but with a little thought, we managed to crank out a page that
uses both to its advantage, and still looks reasonably good in most browsers,
including text-only ones (if you disagree, please let me know, as I haven't
really cross-platform tested this thing as much as I'd like to.  In particular,
I haven't looked at this with Opera or any of the Mozilla builds.)  Pages load
faster because they only have to read the CSS file once.  As an added bonus,
since all the formatting is done by files outside of the pages themselves, I can
let the marketroids dump raw text into a pre-made template file, and voila! --
instant webpage.


--
Eric Hillman
UNIX Sysadmin/Webmaster
City & County Credit Union
ehillman@cccu.com