Is CSS all it's cracked up to be?

**ryan.small** · 02-21-2005, 12:39 AM

CSS is "all-the-rage" it seems in web design but having just done a bit of reading on it at http://www.w3.org it seems like its still in development. In fact, CSS 3 is being worked on right now and it seems as if not all browsers support CSS.

Confused....

-Ryan

**andrews_john** · 02-21-2005, 04:10 AM

Not all browser support every CSS properties. For example Netscape doesn't support such property as "text-decoration".

**ParasHaria** · 02-21-2005, 06:59 AM

CSS and xHTML definately seem to be the way forward in the web design arena. CSS is much more flexible than using tables, etc... and most of the main CSS tags are supported across the board. To date I have found CSS very useful and pretty easy to use. Especially because you can make aesthetic changes through just one file - rather than having to edit each file.

**ryan.small** · 02-21-2005, 12:27 PM

The use of CSS to control the presentational aspects of a page make sense especially in light of what you said about making "aesthetic changes" but I do have a couple of quick questions:

1) Most WYSIWG editors allow you to define a "style" (aka "Theme") to the site which much like CSS allows you to easily control the overall appearance by simply editing the site style. So is CSS a benefit to people using graphical editors?

2) The use of CSS to control positioning instead of using tables really confuses me. My understanding was that the addition of tables to HTML was revolutionary and now along comes CSS and it sounds like tables are "subpar". What's the deal? With CSS are tables not necessary? If so, why?

Thanks for helping a newbie

**ElectricSheep** · 02-21-2005, 01:13 PM

Tables are still necessary for what they were originally intended for - the presentation of data in tabular format.
Using tables for page layout was at the time a useful spin-off, however, semantically, using tables in this way is not a good idea - layout and formatting are best done using CSS.

CSS makes it much easier to maintain and develop a site without interfering with the semantics of the content.
CSS is not 'subpar' - it allows for formatting effects that no HTML tag has been able to achieve in the past.

The browser companies have commited to the W3C ideas but some are better than others at implementing them. CSS was introduced in 1996 and no browser yet supports it in full.

PS Netscape does support text-decoration and in fact Gecko-based browsers such as Netscape, Firefox and Epiphany support the W3C spec better than one or two others I could mention