[C]rummy [S]tyle [S]heets

[altivo]

First there was the web, and it was good. You could communicate clearly and publish whatever you liked, with pictures and diagrams with circles and arrows on them. All you needed was a handful of HTML tags and you were off and running.

Then there came the Users. They complained that it was "too hard" to write in HTML and demanded WYSIWYGs and GUIs to do it with. The gods of geekery listened and made them WYSIWYGs and GUIs. The WYSIWYGs wrote the HTML for the Users and it was good again, for a while.

The Users returned to the gods of geekery and complained again. "We can't make the pages look the way we want them. They come out different in every browser." Again the gods listened and made more tags, and invented frames and tables and font specifications. The web browsers that were once thin clients grew fat and warred amongst themselves. The corporations were taking over.

It became impossible, even using a WYSIWYG, to create pages that worked in all the browsers. Everyone was inventing new things and departing from the standards in every direction. A new HTML standard was proposed but no one wanted to use it. The clients and the WYSIWYGs began to fight among themselves and a few were destroyed in the process.

Then the chief among the gods of geekery, W3C, decreed yet another standard, by now the fourth one, and layered it with a different standard to make things look the same. Versions passed, and more browsers fell by the wayside. The largest of the WYSIWYGs was abandoned by its creator and began to grow very stale as well. After enough versions had passed, though, the browsers started to actually work with the new standard that W3C had made, the one he called See-Ess-Ess. Compared with the first HTML, of course, See-Ess-Ess was cumbersome and huge. Still, the users demanded more features, and it kept growing until a full DTP was required to manage it rather than just a little WYSIWYG.

'Tivo, in his stubbornness, refused to use WYSIWYGs. He kept writing naked HTML through all the turmoils and insisted that it was Good Enough. But finally he couldn't stand against the tide any longer, and in the new year converted one of his repeating HTML projects to See-Ess-Ess. He made the new See-Ess-Ess do the same things that the old plain HTML did, though, so the Users will never know there was a switch. ^_^ He just won't have to type quite as many arcane tags and keywords now.

Comments

[songdawg.livejournal.com]

So which is the superior creature—an inbred Shar Pei with bad skin, bad joints and a bad disposition, or a lowly, user-friendly earthworm?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

For functionality I'd have to go with the earthworm. A better comparison would be to match that Shar Pei against a wild wolf or coyote. I think it's clear which one is superior then. ;p

My real complaint is that the whole original idea of the web, easy publication of ideas and reading with thin clients has been totally suborned by commercial interests mainly for the purpose of pushing advertising at us in a thousand different ways.

[songdawg.livejournal.com]

You mean like they already did with junk mail, junk email, junk fax and unsolicited phone calls? They're trying really hard with advertising blogs, but haven't quite worked out how to get people to read them.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Poison blogs are easy to dodge, and so are pop-ups, usually. The creeping banner ads and those Google relevance things are obnoxious though.

"Looking for raw sex? Try EBay, the world's largest marketplace for the best deal on raw sex.

"Search Amazon for the latest books about raw sex."

And so forth und so weiter...

[aerofox.livejournal.com]

Ooooh
<naked>HTML</naked>

My website was done entirely within a common text editor, which for me is very sloooooow. I often wondered if a WYSIWYG editor would work for me, but never tried. I'm afraid i will end up with a bloated webpage.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Just stay away from FrontPage. But you're a Mac user aren't you? So you don't have to worry about FrontPage. ;p

It's true that the WYSIWYG editors produce very bulky code to achieve things that can be done with much less. But these days everything on the web is bloated, so you might as well use one if you find it easier.

I generally use a smart text editor, like kate or gedit. They don't generate code, but they do parse the basic structures and let you know when you have mismatched brackets or things like that. I believe microemacs does the same, and probably any number of others.

[calydor.livejournal.com]

Personally, when I was dabbling with HTML, I found it useful to use a WYSIWYG editor (at the time, FP Express, ugh) to get the layout etc. right - writing tables and such can be a daunting task. However, once the design was right, I ran through it manually to fix up all the bloat, and later, found a small freeware program meant to simplify pages written in FrontPage. Worked like a charm, and looked good.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I actually used Front Page Express to start this particular project, mostly because I was hoping to turn it over to someone else eventually. Three years later that hasn't happened and it probably isn't going to happen. I long ago quit bothering with Front Page Express because I could get what I wanted much faster by doing my own coding. The main reason for finally introducing CSS is to streamline my own process even farther, which it will do.

The library's website is due for a total rewrite as well. It was designed in FrontPage, and though I've quit using FrontPage to edit it, the FP Bloat still contaminates it badly. If I'm going to go to a new look and layout, then I might as well use CSS to achieve it and gain the ability to make changes more easily while maintaining a consistent style. So the newsletter conversion was a testing ground for that larger project.

[aerofox.livejournal.com]

I've heard that the one that comes with Mozilla or SeaMonkey is rather good.
Just havn't tried it.

I did use Excel once to make a table, then cleaned it up in a text editor
but my HTML knowledge is rather limited.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

HTML itself is limited. You can fit all the essentials onto one of those folding quick reference cards quite easily.

CSS adds a lot of clever formatting tricks, but at the cost of needing a small booklet to list all the keywords and options available.

[nekura-ca.livejournal.com]

And today we mark a sad day, as we lose another HTML texter to the seduction of the dark side. We will observe a moment of silence as a modern website loads...

...

...

...

...

...

We'll end it there, as we only have a limited time. Fare thee well 'Tivo, ye shall be missed.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Heh. It's hardly "modern". It has no Flash animations, no tables, and no backgrounds. I still edit the CSS with a text editor.

Actually, I will admit that CSS cut about 10% of the length from the code, which is good. Nothing got bloated. The same document created by FrontPage would be twice as long.

Still, it depends on browser compatibility so much more heavily. You have to be constantly aware of differences between IE, Firefox, Netscape, Mozilla, and Opera in order to avoid making a page that won't load in one of them. Compared to Lynx or even Mosaic, these "modern" browsers are fat resource hogs that can only travel at a crawl.

[heavens-steed.livejournal.com]

Very clever. I have no idea what any of that computer lingo means, but even an idiot like me can appreciate the cute and crafty satire.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

In essence the innocent little HTML was corrupted by the corporations and perverted by lazy and greedy users until it evolved into an entirely different language, CSS, whose main purpose was flash and advertising. ;p

[mymaimary.livejournal.com]

Originally I was against wysiwigs, but then I made many websites and realized that I didn't want to go back and make all the minute changes my clients demanded. Then it was just easier to turn it over with Frontpage. But that never actually worked because some criticle peice of a table would be deleted while they updated.

But it looks like you are going to be the sole code keeper. So do what you will! And CSS does wonderful things on a single page, but somehow it doesn't translate to all the pages on a site the way it's supposed to for me. Makes me want to write a perl program to make it work...But that would take time and would force me to fix the editor. How do you make it all work together from one page to the next?

You are their hero for maintaing the site. If only they knew...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

So far no problem with getting CSS to apply to multiple pages. I just put the style stuff into one file, and read it into each page with a link in the header. So one stylesheet applies to all pages. The only other thing to do is be consistent in the application of those styles. Remember to use "<p id="small">" rather than just "<p>" and that sort of thing. So far, so good.

[hellmutt.livejournal.com]

Hmm... I don't see the connection between whizzy-wigs and CSS, since it's very possible to do stylesheets by hand - it's just learning another set of arcane keywords.

So you don't think much of the idea behind it (separating style from content and returning HTML to the markup language it was 'always meant' to be)? I'm quite content to use CSS, but I always edit it in plain text, of course.

Naturally it's used for obnoxious things, but so's everything. :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

The connection is lateral rather than direct. WYSIWYG editors for HTML were developed largely to "dumb down" the process of creating web content. However, as I see it, by making web page development look too much like print page layout, that led to demands that web displays work like the printed page and give the author absolute control over appearance, fonts, positioning of elements, etc. That in turn resulted in expansion of HTML until it became so cumbersome that CSS was a natural development.

The concept behind CSS is good within the context of HTML as it stands now. I just find it unnecessarily complex. When I finally decided to use it, I was also disgusted to find that straightforward presentations on how it works and how it is structured are greatly lacking. Writers on the topic either assume you are a complete idiot who doesn't even know HTML basics or else that you have already been using both HTML and CSS for so long that you only need to know tricks and gimmicks for doing obnoxious and pushy stuff with it.

My two cents (adjusted for inflation)

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

I'll definitely agree that the commercial advertising interests have pretty much ruined the World Wide Web. Yet we've needed things like CSS and other formatting developments to allow developers to present information in the most effective way. (Well, maybe not Javascript. That still bugs me, largely because it gives my computers fits sometimes on dial-up.) Which I guess is to say that I really really like CSS; I like pretty web sites. I haven't tried to decide whether it's overly complicated, though I will grant that it *is* complicated. I just wish that Microsoft and other big corporations had gone along with the W3C and kept to those standards. Maybe there wouldn't be so many differences between browsers in rendering the same page.

As for Front Page, ick. And have you ever seen what Word does to a page that it's saving as HTML? Utter abomination in the code bloat department. Give me Notepad anyday, or better yet an ASCII editor that can parse, like Ultra-Edit on the PC or Text Wrangler on the Mac (Hm, that one may not parse but it at least shows your tags in different colors so they're readable).

Re: My two cents (adjusted for inflation)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

The thing is, the corporations, both software sellers and web site advertisers, have been the driving force behind web site bloat and code inflation, just so they could make their advertising look like magazine pages or worse yet, television ads. The software developers have caved to demands in a willy-nilly fashion rather than creating sensible standards and following them. Microsoft, on top of the rest, is guilty of creating its own rules and ignoring standards, believing that such behavior perpetuates some mythical marketing edge. (IBM used to do the same thing, lot of good it did them in the long run.)

Pretty web pages are OK. Bloated web pages suck. I bail out rather than wait for them to load. Flash is the worst of all, yet more and more web developers are relying on it exclusively. Java and Javascript are largely unnecessary and should be kept to specific complex uses, like corporate intranets with interactive databases and such.

I agree about smart text editors. My current favorite is kate, which comes with the KDE desktop environment on Linux. I don't use KDE, but I do use kate. It does limited parsing and error correction, and knows the punctuation rules and basic structure of many languages, including HTML, CSS, and XML, so it catches mismatched parentheses and so forth and colors parameter names, values, and such in different ways to highlight them for you.

CSS is good for bringing the look of a group of web pages into sync. It also helps you maintain style on pages that are altered frequently. I don't really object to it, except that the syntax is already bloated due to the demands of users who insist on treating the web as a desktop publishing environment, which it decidedly is not. And in general, the guidebooks, tutorials, and online documentation for CSS are very, very poor. (See my reply to hellmutt on that.)

Re: My two cents (adjusted for inflation)

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

What I know about CSS, I've gleaned from the W3C's specification, which is a little like learning English by reading a dictionary. It only works for me because I can sometimes get to a point where I go "Aha! It works like Pagemaker or WordPerfect here." But I've never found decent documentation for CSS besides the W3C spec, and that's techie enough that it wouldn't qualify as good documentation for new users.

I do like the way CSS helps make website pages look the same format-wise. All one has to do is keep a list of all the id's and classes, which somehow I never manage to remember. :)

My initial inspiration for web design was Creating Killer Web Sites by David Siegel, published in the 1990s. It came out before Javascript and Flash was common, so I don't think it would be terribly offensive. I just liked how he took a designer's approach to web design, which would still put functionality first but add "prettiness" in service to the functionality. Well, if one had good design sense, at least.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Geeks!
Heh heh, I like using both the WYSIWYG and html :) That's why dreamweaver is my choice but I only do basic things.