The Transition to CSS
(page 3 of 3)
Although incomplete, support for CSS since version 5 browsers is good; 95% of browsers in use today are version 5 and above. Most web designers no longer sweat Netscape 4. Richard York is the author of a pretty good book entitled, Beginning CSS, Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design. In his chapter on Liquid Design, Richard writes, "The truth is simply this: Why sacrifice all the benefits of CSS-based design for a handful of designers still using a version 4 browser issued nearly seven years ago? In short, there comes a time in standards evolution when you must sacrifice backward compatibility in the name of better things."
The time for CSS has come!
As I mentioned earlier, browser support for CSS is incomplete and inconsistent across browsers. Therefore, testing your web pages in different browsers is essential. Getting CSS to display the same across all browsers may be the most challenging and the most frustrating part of the design process. But it's also part of the learning process and the more you use CSS the more you learn what works and what doesn't work for different browsers. Occasionally, you will also have to use some work-arounds.
CSS is the hot topic these days in the web design community and you will find a lot of support. When you run into a problem, chances are you'll be able to easily find a solution. Project Seven, a web site that promotes CSS layouts and menus, has a great newsgroup to help web designers with CSS. Project Seven also has a number of CSS tutorials. The CSS Zen Garden showcases several web sites and provides their stylesheets so you can see how CSS was used to achieve their layouts. There are also several excellent books about CSS. One of my favorites, The CSS Anthology, 101 Essential Tips, Tricks, and Hacks by Rachel Andrew, is full of practical solutions and css code that will help you put CSS to work.
There are still web designers who are hesitant about transitioning to CSS presentation. Many still rely heavily on HTML presentation elements and HTML tables to layout their web pages. It's difficult to give up old, comfortable habits. But it's definitely time for all web designers to leave deprecated HTML tags behind and to embrace CSS and well-structured XHTML.
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