CSS is not all that bad!

July 21, 2006  

John C Dvorak recently wrote an article titled Why CSS Bugs Me which raised the heckles of a few web designers out there.

Now apparently Dvorak is an admitted troll, so we won’t take it to heart but his article was replete with ignorance and incorrect statements. Some I was hearing for the first time but others were familiar cries from people new to CSS.

The article is best deconstructed in this blog post so I won’t go into it but I just wanted to make a few points:

• CSS is a non-trivial markup language that solves a non-trivial problem
• CSS IS a standard; if a browser does not comply to the standard (or has bugs like IE), it’s not the fault of the CSS standard creators. Ok, yes, sometimes interpretations of the standards can differ but it’s better than no standard at all… Having said that, this issue is disappearing. When I check my website logs, the majority of users are using either IE6 (soon to be superseded with IE7 which supposedly fixes the bugs /quirks in IE6) or Mozilla / Firefox – very good CSS support. Pretty much anything that works in Firefox works in Safari 1.3, so no problem there. And who uses Netscape, Opera or other browsers these days? One of the problems I do see is Internet users not keeping their browsers up-to-date and continuing to use, for example, IE5.0 on Windows 95 with a 14″ screen. Ok, I’m sorry, if you’re going to be using hardware and software that’s practically ancient in Internet years, expect to have problems using newer technology…
• CSS was not designed to be written by lay-persons – it’s a technology, it has a learning curve (though not a huge one). It’s not mean to be idiot-proof. That’s what software like Frontpage is for. And nobody’s stopping you using table-based HTML, if that’s what you prefer. Better still, hire a web designer.

So I say to Mr Dvorak: Ok, so you are a “cranky geek” but please don’t spread misinformation and ignorance, especially when so many people are working hard to improve web technology.