Search the web and you can find more articles and tutorials covering Cascading Style Sheets than you can find unruly children in Walmart. But I had to learn a lot about CSS to create this site, so I’m going to talk about it anyway.
CSS is sort of like a magic spell the Gandalfs of the Internet cast over various web documents. (Cascading Style Spells?) These spells tell a browser where things go on a page, and what they should look like when they get there.
I’m not going to discuss the nuts and bolts (wands and potions?) of CSS. Maybe someday, if I can figure out how to make such a tutorial without boring everyone to tears, I will do so. For now, I just want to share a few of morsels of knowledge I’ve picked up in my travels.
1. Internet Explorer Sucks
While most other browsers comply with web standards, Microsoft feels they are above such petty rules. It’s bad enough that a web designer has to contend with a Dwarven treasure trove of ancient browsers, but the maker of the most widely used browser doesn’t think they need to be part of the solution.
2. Making the Simple Complicated
CSS can do a lot, but sometimes it takes enormous effort to accomplish a very simple task. For example, you might expect there would be a simple alignment function that would allow you to horizontally center an object. You’d be disappointed. And forget about vertical centering. I’m pretty sure that requires approval from The Council of Elrond.
3. One Style Sheet to Rule Them All
My favorite feature of CSS is the ability to use external style sheets. Instead of having a bunch of style codes at the top of every document, you can have all of your documents point to one external file. In other words, you can keep all of your spells on one scroll. This way you can make a change to one file (your external style sheet), and it will effect anything that’s using that style sheet. (Anything that’s under that spell.)
4. The Future is Bright
Even Microsoft is slowly coming on board the web standards bandwagon. I envision a future where a web designer can focus on designing more and worrying about browser compatibility less.
I think all the ugly coding and technical jargon that goes along with web design acts as a barrier to a lot of creative people who might otherwise revolutionize the industry. If future versions of CSS are more streamlined, and more intuitive, we might just live to see that revolution.
Filed under: Design by Ed
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Topics: CSS, Web Design
