Re: Should I develop in CSS now?

Hello Ira,

At 12:08 PM 25/10/98 -0500, you wrote:
>Regarding CSS...should I convert my pages to CSS?  I've been reading about
>all the hassle about
>incompatibilies of IE and Netscape's support of CSS and DHTML, as well as
>not being able to control
>the display attributes of the user (default fonts, screen widths, point
>sizes, etc.).=20

Personally I think you should start right away.  I've been including CSS in
my designs more and more.  I'm redesigning my personal Web site and
building my professional one using a lot of CSS.  The incompatibilities
between IE, Netscape and the actual spec are indeed a problem but mostly
with absolute positioning and more advanced stuff.  Just keep in mind that
IE 4.01 supports over 90% of the CSS1 spec and Netscape about 50%.  Opera
3.5 also has very good support foe CSS1.  Netscape has many bugs in how it
supports some of the properties though.  Don't let that stop you though,
CSS is still a very powerful design tool right now and will only get better
with 5th generation browsers (hopefully).  Things like user default
settings and screen resolutions is something we already have to deal with.
The designers styles have precedence over the user styles in the cascade
according to the spec so don't worry too much about that.  The rules of
design haven't changed with CSS but it does make achieving the results you
want a lot easier.

>
>In addition, there will be problems with display of pages in older=
 browsers.

That is not true.  The beauty of CSS is that it degrades gracefully.  It
won't break up your page in older browsers because they will simply ignore
the style declarations.  It helps if you code your HTML to the standards
and separate form from structure as much as possible.  Coding to HTML 4.0
transitional lets you use a lot of the now deprecated physical formatting
tags of HTML and mix them with style sheets.

You have to be aware of one thing though:

You have to be careful to avoid conflict between style property values and
the values you specify for specific elements in HTML.  For example, if you
specify Arial as the font for your P tags and put font tags within
paragraphs that specify another font the results will probably not be what
you want.  According to the spec, style sheets should have precedence over
in line style formatting like FONT tags and alignment attributes but
current browsers usually give precedence to the HTML formatting tag.  Test
your pages in many browsers and validate your Style Sheets and HTML
documents and you should be fine.

>
>I was wondering how many designers are actually currently using CSS, or is
>it better to wait for the next
>generation of browsers and hardware.

I know I'm not waiting.  It is possible to design nice looking pages for
older browsers now but that look fantastic in 4th generation browsers and
up.  Now is the right time to learn CSS or you'll probably fall behind
later.  The amount of control it gives over layout is amazing and it does
help clean up the code.  Go through the Guild lists' archives to find about
links to good CSS resources or good books to read.

HTH!

St=E9phane Bergeron

HWG: hwg-graphics mailing list archives, maintained by Webmasters @ IWA