June 24, 2002

Do Style Sheets Suck?

This site should shows up as a clean-looking 2 column, right menu layout. This will only happen if you have a modern browser that can handle CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets.

One day several years ago an editor from Women's Wear Daily called and was asking about breath meditations. As we spoke, she surfed to the site and I said, "You see where there is a link to breath meditations on the right side of the screen?" She said, "No . . . " and then found it way down at the bottom of the page, where non-CSS compliant browsers put it. Uh-Oh!

June 18, 2002

Design of this Site

The Joy of Cascading Style Sheets

For better or worse, and for reasons known only to my fingertips, this site was done with CSS, Cascading Style Sheets. Cascading Style Sheets are supposed to be the "new wave" of structural markup, allowing web browsers to load pages faster. They are also supposed to be standard, but in fact different versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer apparently interpret the style sheets differently. Ahhhh, Houston, we have a small problem.

For more information than you ever wanted to know about the code behind what you see on the web, see the CSS Know-It-All Site. It will tell you why you need a recent generation browser to view my site, because although CSS has been around for years, the browsers have only gradually become compliant with the standards. Something like that. From what I gather reading DevGuru and sites such as The Good Oil, a bunch of layout geeks stay up late dreaming of clean code. When they enter a pure Zen state of layout enlightenment, they email each other elegant solutions, which eventually become the published standards for HTML on the web. Then they gnash their teeth for years while the coders for Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera and Omni catch up. So if my web site looks horrible in your browser, it's the browser's fault!

The good news is that, having done all this, I can easily post new stuff to the site every day. I can just toss text in here with no formatting, and the style sheets make it look OK, as long as you have a CSS-compliant browser. Browsers are free, so just get one from this millennium! The bad news is that I am now bonded to style sheets, the Stockholm effect from those late nights looking at code last week.

What happened was, I bought Adobe GoLive for OS X, played with it, bought the GoLive for Dummies book and read it for an hour, and GoLive still seemed too imposing. Then I started watching the excellent Quicktime movie tutorials of how to get started with GoLive, and realized that yes, this is a powerful tool, but no, I don't really know what I want the site to look like yet. So hmmmm, maybe I'll look around a bit and see what sites I like. The GoLive manual recommends CSS, and in looking around for design examples I came across a clean site called Blue Robot. I fell in love with the elegant simplicity of what Rob did here. I thought, Aha, that's what I want my site to look like.

In order to understand what Rob at Blue Robot did in constructing his style sheets, I started looking at all kinds of CSS's on the web, and followed a link to Textism. Textism pointed me to some Applescripts for formatting HTML in Tex-Edit, an incredibly handy word processor for the Mac OS, which I used in creating this site.

Anyway, that's the route I took instead of working my way through the GoLive tutorials. Currently, I am wondering why it takes days and days, like 40 hours, to create a simple site such as this, and why I still don't really know anything about HTML4.

I kept coming back to Blue Robot as a model of Zen design.