you’re reading “Boring CSS?” an article from edgeofmyseat.com
This CSS, Web Standards article was written by Rachel Andrew on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2001
The article that follows was written in 2001, it remains here as I feel it is of interest to see how far things have come in such a short space of time.
Your CSS Bores Me writes Chris Casciano at ChunkySoup.net, pondering why CSS designs all look the same.
Its an accusation I hear frequently, along with ‘people only use CSS positioning for personal sites’.
I’d like to propose a few reasons why this might be so.
It’s all in the code
Right now none of the top visual development environments allow designers to develop in CSS-P to any great extent *. My area of knowledge is with Macromedia Dreamweaver which cannot even render a document that has a right positioned menu let alone allow the creation of such a document.
* Since this article was written, the visual development environments have improved in their support of CSS. Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 displays CSS well and has a number of new tools for developers making extensive use of CSS
Therefore, if you want to create a page using CSS for the layout you need to be happy working in the code, you also need to be happy to relearn all you knew about page layout before - this time with no visual environment to give you any assistance, and without the tools that you have become used to using in your work.
Beware the naysayers
As soon as you build your first page or site with CSS, you will want to show it to your fellow designers and developers. At that point half of them will tell you that you have lost your marbles. “ooo… but what about Netscape 4″ they will say, and tell you all sorts of terrible tales about designers who failed to be backwards compatible and now are unemployable.
If the naysayer happens to be your studio manager or boss you may well find your attempts to introduce CSS layouts into your web design shop vetoed before you even get a chance to do some really cool stuff in your team environment where ideas really get a chance to grow and the fun stuff is created.
It’s early days
I trained in ballet. When you learn ballet you spend years and years doing exercises. You train your muscles to act in a certain way, learn to think in a certain way. Only after years of training can you take all that knowledge and apply it creatively while staying within the constraints of the technique you have hammered into your muscles over the years.
Most of us are still in the training stage when it comes to CSS layouts, we’re learning the tools. We are well used to the contraints of tables based layouts and can write in all the workarounds and avoid all the known issues and even do really creative things within those constraints because the actual coding is no longer difficult. With a brand new way of working we have to relearn, and play, and look at other people’s examples so that our understanding of the tools gets to the point where we stop needing to think about how we will put it together and more about what would be really cool.
It is a good thing that people are learning the tools, learning what has been laid out in the CSS specifications will allow creativity within the constraints of good technique laid out in those specifications.
I’m not a designer, I’m a coder first and foremost but I’m really excited at seeing what real designers will start to come up with as they get to grips with this new way of working or collaborate, either in their workplaces or in their own time, to really utilise all the potential that we have in our new way of working. There are agencies out there putting out sites designed with CSS for layout.
The article that I referenced at the beginning finished by asking “What will it take to get people to seriously consider CSS based designs as viable outlet for their creative endevours?”. I would say it will take:-
- A little more time
- the major players in the authoring environment market bringing themselves up to date and allowing people developing sites with CSS layouts to work in their familiar environment
- More education of the naysayers, with a little thought using a CSS layout doesn’t have to mean losing backwards compatibility, in fact this way of working is very easy to sell. Forwards compatibility is a very good thing to someone about to spend several thousand on a website.
