A reader, Josh Weinberg, wrote in to comment on my CSS Sucks article. The article gets a ton of traffic mostly from people typing: “CSS Sucks” into google. I think I’m onto something.
Josh put together a number of example of how broken CSS is by showing examples of the CSS Zen Garden with different content. He literally took the CSS markup with no modification and simply changed the content to be smaller. The results broke some designs beyond recognition other designs had varied results. Take a look.
The point here is that CSS Zen Garden is an artificial utopia that doesn’t exist in the real world
- Content is dynamic
- You can’t rely on the content length or it’s presence
- You can’t expect a custom class for every text element
- You can’t do image replacement if the text is dynamic
Thank you CSS Zen Garden for helping prove my point that CSS still sucks.
Stop about CSS, the real problem is the client/server model. It should be minimized on the client side: instead of sending the flow of html datas, one should just push the pixels to the browser, hence your web site and its design will be independant of any browser.
One has VNC or NoMachine’s protocol for this job, that doesn’t take a lot more of bandwidth. There’re may be some drawbacks, but considers that in the end you could use the tools that you want without bothering about the browsers.
Yes well,
I like Css and it sure makes updating a lot easier.
But it’s not by any means perfected yet.
Im not sure why CSS sucks? You’d prefer inline styles? Maybe some font tags?
On almost all of our web based applications it makes everyones life a lot easier when a developer comes to me and says …. ‘this button text color is wrong how do I fix it’ and I can easily edit design in a single place rather than having to track down changes in individual pages.
Yep valid conclusions. CSS has made things fragile, fussy and browser dependent instead of the opposite. Trebles design time. Try passing that to your customer, who just does not care if it uses CSS or not. Its a blind alley technically.
I know of very few sites actually using “cascading” to any degree, most just seem to use a whole bunch of classes and assign them as if they were attributes. Really that would be a better approach to develop IMHO