CSS – nice!

So far, I’ve managed to avoid being paid to do HTML – and I count that as a Very Good Thing. To date, the pinnacle of my achievement in creating an entire site from scratch is www.bakerbates.com. Which is crap, obviously.

In my defence, however, it was done in about 1998 before I knew much about anything in particular, and as I started to feel the blast wave of CSS about to make obsolete any HTML skills I had anyway.

But for ages I’ve been meaning to a) do something about that site, and b) construct something with CSS to see what the big deal is. What better to do both with bakerbates.com? It’s a pitifully simple design, so I decided to cut my CSS teeth last night on the home page, and try to make it all XHTML valid as well (although on this latter standard, I’m even more sketchy).

And hey wow it’s quite easy! Not only that, it’s really, really nice not having to bother with those blasted tables and nested stuff. Want to position that block just there? You can! It’ll stay there, and even overlap another area of screen if you get it wrong. Hooray!

CSS is what HTML should always have been. Sure, it doesn’t completely separate presentation from content, but it does the next best thing. I’m a bit unclear as to how the finer principles work, but I think I’m getting there. After half an hour I had a pure CSS version of the home page just working by example from www.csszengarden.com, a site a very beautiful person at work told me about.

Not long perhaps before the trough of disillusionment, but so far, it’s fun!