CSS is so Frustrating - Sat, 22 Dec 2007

Writing webpages in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) was simple. You learned a few tags and use a simple text-based HTML editor to create it.

But then, along came the “experts” who said you have to split off the content from the styling. The content goes into the HTML file and the styling goes into the CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) file.

In theory that’s fine. But why did they have to make CSS ten times as complicated as it had to be? Yes they want to make it more powerful, but they made it so much more difficult. I shouldn’t have to struggle to be able to figure out how to do something. It should be clear cut. Although, I must say after two weeks of heavy-duty working with it, I’ve learned a lot and finally have developed my own style for my pages.

But the real difficulty is that they’ve made it so complicated that all the different browsers still don’t implement everything the same way. Developing table-less columns and CSS-based borders around the content doesn’t take long to do. But debugging it in Internet Explorer and Firefox and then trying to tweak it just right so that it looks the same is very frustrating. Once everything starts to look good, I try something else, like print-previewing, and it leads to more head-banging-on-wall. Then I go back in time and try to look at it in Netscape 4.7 and it looks God-awful. That’s the price I guess, of moving forward to current standards.

I keep saying to myself that this is all worthwhile. The style sheets can then be applied to my Behold blog, forum, purchase page and help file, and it should all look the same. And I only have to go through the “pain” of developing it once.