Does CSS Suck?

Over at PCMag.com there is a debate going on over the usability of CSS. The
discussion was initiated by an article by John Dvorak called "Why CSS Bugs
Me" (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1987181,00.asp). The discussion
starts here:
http://discuss.pcmag.com/forums/1/10...spx#1004331343.

Someone suggested that some of you folks might have a thing or two to say
about the topic, so I'm inviting everyone to drop by and give their
thoughts.

May I suggest that you not spend too much effort or attention on the Dvorak
article per se, since it's one of the more poorly written posts.

The upshot of it all is that there seem to be a lot of people - myself
included - who feel that CSS is seriously flawed, maybe even fatally flawed.
I'd like to hear your thoughts on it.

Bill Norton wrote:

Over at PCMag.com there is a debate going on over the usability of
CSS. The discussion was initiated by an article by John Dvorak called
"Why CSS Bugs Me" (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1987181,00.asp).
The discussion starts here:
http://discuss.pcmag.com/forums/1/10...spx#1004331343.

I think the comments by blueice03 (near the bottom) says it best. You
actually have to *learn* how to use it correctly.

Someone suggested that some of you folks might have a thing or two to
say about the topic, so I'm inviting everyone to drop by and give
their thoughts.

Nah ...

May I suggest that you not spend too much effort or attention on the
Dvorak article per se, since it's one of the more poorly written
posts.

Must agree with that. <g>

The upshot of it all is that there seem to be a lot of people -
myself included - who feel that CSS is seriously flawed, maybe even
fatally flawed. I'd like to hear your thoughts on it.

CSS is only flawed by those who don't know how to use it.

--
-bts
-Warning: I brake for lawn deer

Bill Norton wrote:

The upshot of it all is that there seem to be a lot of people - myself
included - who feel that CSS is seriously flawed, maybe even fatally flawed.

Please fill in the blanks:

CSS does/has __________. This is a serious flaw because _________.

The solution to this problem is __________________.

If you can't fill in the first two blanks, then your "feeling"
is seriously flawed, maybe even fatally flawed.

If you can fill in the first two, but can't fill in
the third, then your feeling makes no practical difference,
does it?

--
Wes Groleau

Always listen to experts. They'll tell you
what can't be done and why. Then do it.
-- Robert A. Heinlein

Bill Norton wrote:

May I suggest that you not spend too much effort or attention on the Dvorak
article per se, since it's one of the more poorly written posts.

Most of them are poorly written, at least in terms of common sense.

So Dvorak noticed that some browsers failed to correctly
implement a well-written standard and leapt to the amazing
conclusion that CSS is broken?

Where in ____ did I ever get the notion that guy had brains?

And then ten sycophants pop in to agree with him?

--
Wes Groleau

Always listen to experts. They'll tell you
what can't be done and why. Then do it.
-- Robert A. Heinlein

Well, OK. I guess I was expecting a little more in the way of substance than
this.

Never mind, then.



"Wes Groleau" <groleau+news (AT) freeshell (DOT) org> wrote

Bill Norton wrote:
May I suggest that you not spend too much effort or attention on the
Dvorak article per se, since it's one of the more poorly written posts.

Most of them are poorly written, at least in terms of common sense.

So Dvorak noticed that some browsers failed to correctly
implement a well-written standard and leapt to the amazing
conclusion that CSS is broken?

Where in ____ did I ever get the notion that guy had brains?

And then ten sycophants pop in to agree with him?

--
Wes Groleau

Always listen to experts. They'll tell you
what can't be done and why. Then do it.
-- Robert A. Heinlein

In article <yjczg.31445$Cn6.6546 (AT) tornado (DOT) texas.rr.com>,
Bill Norton <bnorton (AT) austin (DOT) rr.com> wrote:

The upshot of it all is that there seem to be a lot of people - myself
included - who feel that CSS is seriously flawed, maybe even fatally flawed.
I'd like to hear your thoughts on it.

CSS isn't flawed, and it doesn't suck. What sucks is Microsoft's
implementation of it. That alone is *the* cause of *my* grief
concerning CSS. If nobody ever used IE for browsing again, CSS
would be a beautiful thing to use. But with IE around, it becomes a
mess of ugly hacks.

-A

Bill Norton wrote:

Over at PCMag.com there is a debate going on over the usability of CSS.
The discussion was initiated by an article by John Dvorak called "Why CSS
Bugs Me"

As a rule of thumb, treat anything John Dvorak says as

(a) Complete garbage

and

(b) And attempt to get a rise out of people who like whatever he is trashing
this week (so he gets lots of page views, so ZDNet get advertising revenue,
so he gets paid).



--
David Dorward <http://blog.dorward.me.uk/> <http://dorward.me.uk/>
Home is where the ~/.bashrc is

"Bill Norton" <bnorton (AT) austin (DOT) rr.com> wrote:

Over at PCMag.com there is a debate going on over the usability of CSS. The
discussion was initiated by an article by John Dvorak called "Why CSS Bugs
Me" (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1987181,00.asp). The discussion
starts here:
http://discuss.pcmag.com/forums/1/10...spx#1004331343.

Someone suggested that some of you folks might have a thing or two to say
about the topic, so I'm inviting everyone to drop by and give their
thoughts.

May I suggest that you not spend too much effort or attention on the Dvorak
article per se, since it's one of the more poorly written posts.

The upshot of it all is that there seem to be a lot of people - myself
included - who feel that CSS is seriously flawed, maybe even fatally flawed.
I'd like to hear your thoughts on it.

Like most discussions on web fora the quality of the discussion is poor,
I gave up after reading a few pages.

There are several threads of considerably better quality in this group's
archive if you want to read up on some of the flaws with and in CSS.

--
Spartanicus

Spartanicus wrote:

Like most discussions on web fora the quality of the discussion is
poor, I gave up after reading a few pages.

It's regrettable that web-forums (sick) have steadily become more and
more difficult to discriminate from newsfroups; Google is not solely
responsible for this, by any means. But they are by far the biggest
hijacker of froups.

I guess we never guessed what effect DejaGoo was going to have.

Please come back, DejaVu: all is forgiven!
--
Jack.
http://www.jackpot.uk.net/

Bill Norton schrieb:

Over at PCMag.com there is a debate going on over the usability of CSS. The
discussion was initiated by an article by John Dvorak called "Why CSS Bugs
Me" (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1987181,00.asp). The discussion
starts here:
http://discuss.pcmag.com/forums/1/10...spx#1004331343.

It is an easy and cheap journalist method to present oneself as kind of
a rebel by writing "xxx sucks and I am the only one who dares to say the
truth", and thus get a bunch of pro and contra reactions. The result is
an annoyingly boring discussion with mostly religion-like statements, as
the example shows.

Now here's my point of view: The core idea of CSS is brilliant. Today's
real world appearance of it shows some flaws, some of the most serious
ones are IMO:

1. Not solved problems of screen representation:
- The lack of an overall applicable and consistent unit for screen
representation (as the em value is context dependent)
- The lack of consistent image scaling (technically limited by the
impossibility of acceptable rendering of scaled low-res images;
standards- resp. implementation-limited by the absence of background
scaling)
- Box model problems, which will hopefully be solved with the
availability of the box-sizing property (defining an element with a 2px
border, 1em padding and total width of 60% is impossible; there is not
even a consistent rendering of a text field and a select element with
the same width, border and padding applied)

2. Browser implementations
- Poor implementation of CSS in quite popular browsers, as well known in
this group
- Long lifetime of browser versions makes CSS development very slow. If
today a perfect Internet Explorer would be published, we will still have
to code for IE6 in 5 or 10 years.

3. User understanding
- Clients and sometimes also authors expect CSS to make their site look
identical in every situation, instead of appropriately different in
every situation.
- Designers often design for their own screen as if it was a piece of paper.

Now the presence of this kind of flaws is not surprising, as the
development of CSS is community-driven and influenced by a variety of
stakeholders, such as the W3C, browser manufacturers, authors, authors'
clients, users. This kind of project develops slowly by nature, and it
develops also by people discussing their needs in this group, or posting
suggestions to the W3C, but not by general "CSS sucks" statements.

The alternative to CSS would be a proprietary software developed by one
company. This is actually available - anybody feeling uncomfortable with
CSS can use Flash or PDF to gain total control over the appearance of
his/her informations. I am sure the same person would post a "Why Flash
bugs me" or "Why PDF bugs me" article shortly.

--
Markus