Cascading Style Sheets: To Hell with Standards
By Michael Floyd
Obviously, Sucky had seen better times. There he was, curly matted hair, limping on one hind leg, and barking at me. I decided that Sucky, my neighbor's, well, dog had a bad interface. Hmmm, I thought, maybe a makeover might be in order. So I trotted over to my neighbor's house, Sucky in tow, to share my thoughts on redesigning Sucky's look and feel. I was surprised to find that my neighbor didn't share my enthusiasm. Rich felt that while the dog didn't necessarily meet the standards of the neighborhood, Sucky's appearance and demeanor were sufficient to scare off any prowler -- in other words, he served his intended purpose.
I've talked little about the presentation of HTML and XML up to this point, so I thought I'd spend the next couple of columns covering this important topic. The story begins with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) because few production Web sites actually use style sheets. The problem is that browser support is inconsistent, to say the least. Just like Sucky, Web developers would rather limp along with one bad interface than try to please the entire browser neighborhood.
This month, I'll reintroduce you to Cascading Style Sheets, Level 1 (CSS1), which is now part of the HTML 4 standard. We'll also look briefly at the latest features in CSS2. I'll also examine the similarities and differences in how each browser supports these standards, which is essential if you want to keep up with the big dogs.
CSS1 in a Nutshell
The tag line of my BeyondHTML.c
