[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

[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.