[OT] style sheets (was Re: [SG] David's KraVak rules)

katie@fysh.org wrote:
> Quoting Tony Francis <tony.francis@kuju.com>:
> > 
> > Style sheets ? You could change the look of the whole site by
> > uploading one new file.
> 
> Hahahahahahaha.
> 
> Only one ickle snag there: they don't WORK.

They work very well in many modern browsers (IE5+, Netscape 
6/Mozilla/other Gecko based browsers, Opera, etc., etc.). And work 
very well in old browsers that don't support them at all. It's only a 
few intermediate browsers that screw things up (IE3, Netscape 4 and 
to a lesser extent IE4). 
 
> I was playing with them a while back, I found that pages look
> COMPLETELY different on various browsers,

Yep, that's how it's supposed to work. Web pages are not meant to 
look the same on all browsers. Style sheets make suggestions as to 
the presentation and browsers apply those suggestions as best they 
can, maybe in combination with a user style sheet. So long as the 
underlying HTML is structurally sound the style sheets merely add an 
optional presentation on top of it. 

If presentation is more important than content then use PDF or Flash 
or whatever instead of HTML/CSS.

> Netscape requires Javascript turned on to run CSS. 

Netscape 4.x only. And this is a good thing as Netscape 4's CSS 
support is so buggy that many pages are better without it.
 
> Seriously, CSS involves lots of pain to get everything working right
> on all the browsers.

Not really, I use it every day. I create commercial web sites for a 
living and use CSS to implement the majority of the presentation, I 
just make sure that Netscape 4 never gets to see those parts of the 
CSS that it would screw up. See 
http://pixels.pixelpark.com/~koch/hide_css_from_browsers/ for some 
simple techniques to hide CSS from the buggy browsers. 

> {Disclaimer: I gave up and wrote perl scripts to write massive amounts
> of regular HTML instead..}

Regular HTML is just what you should have before you start applying 
the CSS. The problem is irregular HTML - the 1997 era stuff: all font 
tags, nested tables and spacer GIFs. Yuck.

	Steve
-- 
"Politics is for the moment.  An equation is for eternity." 
						 -- Albert Einstein