From a forum:
bq. I can’t be the only user out here who doesn’t give a fig for XHTML, is perfectly happy with font tags, and thinks CSS is an enormous waste of time. We’re just not as vocal as the proponents of the well-formed Web.
Just what do you say to someone with this viewpoint, that will convince them that CSS isn’t a waste of time? Especially when, untill all browsers have decent support for CSS, it is a PITA(Pain In The AR**) to write sometimes, and we can’t deny the fact (try viewing this site in Opera to see a problem or two…)
2 comments ↓
What sold me on CSS was what I call the “write once, apply anywhere” possibilities of external stylesheets. There’s one hell of a difference between writing half-a-dozen or more:
<P><FONT FACE=”Helvetica,Arial,Sans-Serif” COLOR=”#FF0000″ FAVOURITE_FOOD=”Cheese”>[Text goes here]</FONT></P>
And writing a single:
P {
color: #f00;
font-family: Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif;
favourite-food: Cheese;
}
Which can apply to the entire site. At least, as one who was constantly redesigning in The Distant Past, that’s what I liked most, before I actually started to learn more and more about HTML4.01/XHTML1, and why presentational HTML was such a bad idea, and so on.
As for bad CSS support, of the Big Three engines, IE’s is the worst these days. Opera7 is a *huge* improvement over previous Opera versions (which doesn’t help Linux users, of course), both in terms of CSS and JavaScript. Mozilla is as near-perfect as we’re going to get for a few more years. Apparently the KHTML engine of Konqueror and Safari is also pretty good, however I have a (very) old version of Konqueror and no Macs.
And frankly, if you stay away from too much tricky CSS-P, IE is livable.
CSS saves time, is easier to manage, and is more elegant. I do not see a major advantage of XHTML over HTML 4 Strict… yet. Still, the X is cool
And it’s a very simple transition from HTML4, so why not have the possible “forward-compatibility”?
I think Opera7 these days is actually the most CSS compliant. I only use Mozilla Firebird over it because Firebird is an open-source project and even though the folks at Opera seem great, if they ever hit the big time, it might become difficult for them to compete without more of the stink of commercialism.
IE6 renders font sizes correctly and uses the correct box model with Strict doctypes, at least. It still has trouble with floats, sadly.
Even with the bugs in various browsers, I still think CSS saves more time than font tags and the like. http://www.positioniseverything.net/ is a good reference on the various bugs browsers still have. Show the guy http://www.csszengarden.com/ too, maybe.
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