Archive for June 18th, 2005
Why good designers use CSS
Saturday, June 18th, 2005
I’m going to try to explain this in a succint and clear manner, without writing an essay.
Good designers use web standards because it’s stupid not to. Literally. HTML without CSS layout and design is like C without functions. It’s a perfect analogy—without functions, programmers would have to repeat code that does the same thing over and over again, and get it the same each time it was repeated to remain consistent and avoid errors. Without CSS, designers would have to repeat code for everything, and they’d have to make sure everything remains consistent manually. It’s a horrible thought not to have functions in any programming language—it’s the same with HTML.
CSS is just the natural evolution of web coding. Before, the web didn’t have abstraction. Now it does, and smart people use it. It’s stupid not to. So why all the hype? Because people who understand it really get how important it is. It finally made the web codable. It dissolved the need for middleman design tools. It made web code comprehensible. It’s just the right way to do it.
This is why we need standards support from all major browsers; because once you give people a taste of what’s right, they can’t go back to doing things the wrong way.
Why am I writing this? Because I’m sick of working on this damn project that has 18 nested tables for every piece of text. I’m sure glad we’re moving away from that…