Here's a great guide to CSS design for people who aren't, and don't want to be, web designers. Very well done. Wow.
- jim 10-28-2008 11:57 am

Thanks Jim, I'll show it to my students.
- L.M. 10-28-2008 2:43 pm


Not sure what the focus of your class is exactly, but this article has an interesting, possibly anti-academic, viewpoint. He just concedes that CSS (thanks, perhaps, to the various and incompatible browser implementations) is broken to a degree that it's just not worth really learning all the ins and outs of how to make pages in a religiously correct way. True believers will cringe at several things including:

1) He says it's okay to use tables for layout. The horror!

2) He uses conditional IE statements in the stylesheet. My eyes!

3) He uses javascript hacks to work around browser layout bugs. Oh noes!

Still, his advice seems incredibly practical to me, even if there are some objections from a theoretical standpoint (try making a page with any sense of design work in all browsers without 2 and 3 above!)

This recent article - Everything you know about CSS is wrong - got a lot of links, but to me just demonstrates how crazy the CSS purity track can become. I think I understand the argument, but are you kidding me? That's easier than just using regular tables?

It's not that CSS isn't useful. It's incredibly useful and it would be stupid not to use it. It's just that it's not so great at creating grid based layouts. And graphic design (page design) is all about grid based layouts. I still can't believe I can't make columns of equal height (regardless of the content in each column) without a javascript hack! WTF?

- jim 10-29-2008 12:54 pm





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