css is useless

[justsomeone]

I'm no front-end expert, but I have been astounded at what some developers have done with css - they have completely eliminated tables from their sites and now use css to handle all of the layout. While this was more of a learning curve than I felt like getting into, it opened my eyes to the potential. I'm sure it's probably an online religious war though.

Anyway, CSS is far from useless. But llike any powerful tool (and it is enormously powerful) it is can be used badly, or for the wrong purpose.

Some sites which use CSS instead of tables, for example...
Decibel Magazine
Center for Evidence Based Education

[JustOneUK]

I actually just made a site in pure css that validates as xhtml 1.0 strict as well ...It sucks.

I could have made it in no time at all with tables, and had a far better looking result.

I will however rephrase the subject line of this thread..to CSS mostly sucks

It is OK for styling tables and hyperlinks, but going 100% CSS is a waste of time and money for the MR.Average website.

James

[justsomeone]

And do you tell your clients you're building them a "Mr Average website"?

[JustOneUK]

Originally Posted by justsomeone

And do you tell your clients you're building them a "Mr Average website"?

absolutely
I just put them at the top of the search engine results. Seems to do the trick

I just made this one for crawley carpet cleaning as long as it sits on the first page of google...no worries. For £100 it's not rocket science. It's about affordably putting a business on the map. Not a lot of point making a site like that in css pure.

James

[Anthony Ravenscroft]

The good thing about CSS: You can change a gazillion freakin' pages with one command!!
The bad thing about CSS: You can change a gazillion freakin' pages with one command....

It's the New Millennium answer to frame-pages. Both are pretty good ideas, with a lot of potential power... when used properly. Unfortunately, they not only allow lousy programming & design, but encourage these deficits.

As has been pointed out, slapping everything into CSS quickly results in cookie-cutter pages, & then trying to shape the content to fit the template, rather than crafting the template to fit your presentation.

Designers like CSS because they can crank out garbage & look like they've been busy. After all, most people that hire Web designers have no graphic-arts sense, no design sense, no marketing sense, or no human-interface sense -- quite often, all four. Rather than one exquisite page that all but picks the casual customer's pocket, the client gets a whole bunch of flash & Flash, a hundred slick-looking pages that do little or nothing -- perhaps even negative numbers -- to foster proper interaction with a customer.

"I just put them at the top of the search engine results."

What is this "top" of which you speak? It doesn't turn up at all when I google swimming pools. Oh; perhaps you mean carpet cleaning? Wait a sec... nope. Huh. Perhaps crawley carpet -- hey, there it is! No, wait, that's crawleyontheweb.com.

Strangely, though I use the Internet extensively, & have exceptionally high data-search skills, I don't turn to Google for shopping. I use this new-fangled invention, the electrical teleophone!!

Not meaning to pick on you, JO-UK, but I'm so fatigued about these "Google placement" claims that appear to have little or nothing to do with verifiable reality. How much additional trade -- in pounds, please -- has been generated specifically because of your Web wizardry?

And you might get more business if you weren't simply sellling what ten-thousand others are peddling from their own carts.

[JustOneUK]

Hi Anthony, don't worry you can pick on me all day, I have become immune to it now

Designers like CSS because they can crank out garbage & look like they've been busy.

Interesting phrase, is that one you mean or just a sarcastic remark? personally I believe that's a pretty true statement.

I am changing my CSS layout validating site back to tables because it was such a pain just adding one single page with a slightly different layout

In regards to google positioning, in this instance the customer wanted to out rank his competitor, so I told him how to achieve that. He is currently at #4 which is better than his competitor.

this one for Crawley washing machines is not doing too bad, he made back his website cost within 24 hours.

I don't spend my time making sites for others, generally I only make sites for myself to pay the mortgage, I don't claim to be a "webdesigner" but if something crops up I am always happy to help where possible.

Regards
James

[justsomeone]

The main advantage that I see CSS bringing is that it is a great way of allowing yoru customers to manually or automatically selece from a variety of skins for their viewing pleasure.

You can have the majority of your site (and I'm thinking mostly about dynamic, database-driven sites here as that's my area of expertise) crank your site out in one neutral format. Then you can have CSS take over the load of how to present that content.

You could use one style for regular browsing, another for formatting pages for printing, another for to format pages for smaller devices like PDA's, another which is more suitable to the visually impaired, another which eliminates the graphics for text browsers or screen readers, another for....

And that's what css does really, really well, and much more efficiently than any other way I know.

[JustOneUK]

Some good points there... and well taken. Have you got any examples of sites that utilise css in this way ? (so many formats)

James

[justsomeone]

I'm working on an ecommerce site at the moment thatdoes this for admin functions - the shop admin person can run various reports and either view them onscreen or prepare them for printing. It looks very slick. Sorry I can't demo it - it's a confidential custom build.

I didn't do the CSS work on this - this was done by a front-end genius. I just follow the guidelines when I write my reporting tools and the magic just happens. I'm sure that some targetted googling could show up other examples.

[JustOneUK]

Originally Posted by justsomeone

I didn't do the CSS work on this - this was done by a front-end genius.

So if the CSS needs a "front end genius"...that pretty much endorses the fact that css is pretty useless for all non-genius type persons

teehee