(no subject)

[andrewducker]

One of the main advantages of HTML was that you described what your page in general terms and the browser would then interpret that to produce something the user could then read.

This initial idealism was sadly replaced by grim reality when vast numbers of designers created pages with pixel-perfect design that only worked on particular sized screens with the right colour settings.

Custom Style Sheets (CSS) were was supposed to fix that. The idea was that your basic page would contain no formatting at all - all formatting would be in a seperate file that defined what each section of your page would look like. This would mean that you could change the way your page looked (or even the way that hundreds of pages looked) by changing one place.

We used this in a web system I worked on a few years ago, defining (for instance) numerical fields so that when they were positive they were in green and negative they were in red. When the decision was made to make positive numbers the normal colour a single change in one place flowed instantly through the whole system.

There's a fantastic example of that here. Choose one of the different designs to see how much the custom styles can affect the same information. It's quite stunning.

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Now all we need is some easy way to determine what the optimum form of information is for any given person (likely a series of test questions would suffice) and then have a way to reformat every page to fit this entire range of variation. Not that this will happen anytime this decade...

[andrewducker]

Well, theoretically, people could have their own CSS which would automatically format the pages as they downloaded them.

But for some reason people are loath to have their pages changed by the people reading them.

On the other hand, my friends page is formatted exactly how I want to read it, not how you people have your journals set up...

[(Anonymous)]

CSS actually stands for Cascading Style Sheets

[andrewducker]

Cheers, oh mysterious stranger.

[diffrentcolours]

The CSS spec offers a way for a page designer to offer several different stylesheets for a given medium (as well as specific stylesheets for each media - dark background on screen which disappears when you print the page off, for example), but I don't think it's well supported. Some browsers will let you override server-side stylesheets with client-side stylesheets - a lot of Mozilla hacks are done like this.

[darkoshi]

The Opera browser lets you specify your own stylesheet (although I haven't tried it out) or your own default colors/fonts. And you can easily switch between using either yours or the author's by a button on the toolbar. There's also a button for not loading/displaying images. So whenever you come across a page that doesn't display well, or where the background image contrasts badly with the text, etc., you can just click the appropriate button. There are some pages I specifically use Opera for just because I don't like their background.

A while ago, I had meant to find or make myself a bookmark manager that would work with all my browsers (Opera+IE+NS4+NS7), but I still haven't gotten around to it. If it weren't for that, I would use Opera more often, because it has many such neat features.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

For a contrasting view, read jwz's rant CSS is BS...

[andrewducker]

JWZ is on my friends list :->

CSS has massive problems in that it isn't properly supported (or identically supported across different browsers).

Doesn't mean it isn't useful, just that it isn't a complete solution. But then again, what is?