CSS vs. hard-coding

[oiran]

Despite all my complaining, I am finding the whole Joomla/coding mess very interesting, if frustrating. I wanted to do a site redesign because, well, I just like to do a redesign every now and then, and I wanted to delve into content management systems a bit because they're fairly ubiquitous. Additionally, the Mr. and I will eventually get more serious about our tiny hosting company, so it would be nice if we had turnkey CMS packages ready to go for potential clients, which means that we have to make them, which means I have to make them because the Mr. has other things to do. Like work.

If for no other reason than marketing, I am having to think more seriously about CSS. I understand and appreciate the flexibility inherent in a CSS-based site, but I am also well aware of the limitations - browser incompatibilities, in particular. I have found several wonderful tutorial sites that will show me how to do incredibly complex things with CSS, but I can't help noticing that a large percentage of these tasks could be achieved fairly easily with hard-coded HTML and...TABLES. I love tables, and the bookendy logic that nested tables require is just my kind of thing (picky and precise, yet cluttered at the same time). However, instead of doing what makes sense to me, i.e., tables and hard-coding, I have decided to start from scratch to re-make my new site template (I used code from a free template as my example for the current version) so that I can perhaps learn something practical instead of theoretical about the superiority (or so one would be led to believe) of CSS coding.

Regardless of my intent to use CSS for the site, I am still unconvinced that CSS is inherently superior. I am not a real web designer or graphic designer or anything designer, and I have never been to any seminars about CSS, taken any classes about CSS, or read anything about CSS that wasn't either a tutorial or air-puffed propaganda. From my non-pro perspective, CSS is clearly a design ideal, and a very seductive one, at that, but it seems debatable whether it actually represents a functional improvement over well-considered hard coding. What I like about hard coding is that I can depend upon it: it looks like it's supposed to in every browser without work-arounds, and is thus quick and easy. Since I know my understanding of the subject is limited, I would appreciate it if anyone knows of a link to a good explanation of WHY CSS is superior to hard-coded HTML from a end-user/viewer/functional standpoint.

This is cross-posted to velvetglove, so my apologies if you're seeing it twice.

Comments

[kateo.livejournal.com]

I don't have an explanatory link, but my take is: tables can get just as messy in terms of browser incompatibilities and such. Moreover, browsers typically have difficulty with both long and nested tables to the point where if you had a page rich with long or nested tables, you get the browser needing to load the whole page into the user's cache to figure out what to put where before ever painting a single pixel within the table on the screen. From a page layout perspective, CSS, if done elegantly, can allow you to achieve similar results without the browser overhead.

And again, as you know, CSS offers more than just the page layout capabilities. There's the whole concept of templatizing your work into one central style sheet (or several central style sheets, depending on the complexity of your site) and being able to change an element once (say a text color) to cascade that change throughout the site. That kind of effort savings is priceless when you're dealing with very large sites, such as an e-commerce site (Netflix being one example).

I think the skills you're learning are terribly valuable. CSS as an adjunct to traditional HTML is pretty fundamental to a lot of web work. More and more shops are looking at various web formats like PHP and Flash to be able to achieve the richer web sites clients demand, but HTML & CSS are still at the heart of it all.

Plus, girls like girls with skills.

[oiran.livejournal.com]

Kate! I've missed you!

Ideally, for my past layouts, I would have asked people using various screen resolutions and connection speeds to test out my pages - which use not just infinitely nested tables, but FRAMES - but I settled for just testing screen resolutions on my own computer (which was a 15" screen machine at the time) and relatively speedy connection, and of course everything looks/looked fine. However, besides the density of tables, there are also image maps galore, images instead of text for labels, and basically such an overwhelming preference for images crammed into complicated table structures whenever possible that I wouldn't be surprised if viewing it does indeed crash browsers somewhere.

It's a monster, perhaps, but I still do think it's very pretty, and it looks exactly as I wanted it to, which was my primary concern.

My style for the velvetglove journal used to be 100% b&w because of the impossibility of guaranteeing that any other colors would appear exactly the way I wanted them to on someone else's monitor, not to mention the fact that viewers have their own eyes which may perceive the colors differently, etc., etc. It was actually a huge deal for me to add a color (A color, singular) to the mix. The style for the oiran journal was, in part, a deliberate effort to stop being such a control freak about presentation. Of course, I still use a huge image, but it's a start.

While I knew about the ease of making sweeping changes with CSS vs. hard code, I was still thinking about it only from a design perspective. That this also allows an end-user some control (depending on how it's specified in the CSS) in terms of accessibility wasn't something I even considered. However, a response to this post from a friend on the velvetglove journal points out that most CSS will allow her to change font size...and I instantly felt like a fool. My eyes (and the rest of me) are now of an age where I am starting to need reading glasses in addition to regular glasses. While I'm not having trouble with the computer screen as yet, I'm sure it will happen eventually. This hit me with the force of a revelation, and now I'm all gung-ho with grandiose fantasies of accessibility and anticipating needs while still keeping things pretty.

I've got a local testing server set up so that I can fiddle with PHP and MySQL as part of this redesign, which has expanded past the initial requirement of "graphic diversion" to take up the mental space and importance of a more general learning opportunity with possible real-world utility. But only possible, since I am still of the opinion that I'd most enjoy being a truck driver.

Where have you been? What are you doing? When can we meet up?