January 14, 2004: Website building: some css remarks

Having a new site, also means making a new site. As many will know this can be a pain in the ass. Off course it consists of a few steps: First, make a design. Second, make the pages. Third, test it and fourth do the deployment. I will focus on some aspects of the development.
The use of cascading stylesheets (css) really changed the way of devloping a website, but it is probably also the most difficult part of the process (okay as a developer I am not a graphic designer, so actually designing a nice user interface (ui) is also rather difficult for me). With css, it is really necessary to think about the differrent elements of the website and their relationships. Their properties will be defined with selectors in one or more css's. Because of the cascading nature of stylesheets elements can influence each other. When this is not really thought over it can result in item focussed stylesheets instead of more general stylesheets, decreasing the functionality of the stylesheet and increasing the complexity.

Another issue is the different handling of (X)HTML by different browsers. Some say to focus on IE, because it is most often used. I argue that we only experience the beginning of browsing (mobile browsing is just appearing) and it isn't good to focus on one product but focus on standards. Besides, the different versions of IE also behave different sad. I have to confess that I didn't test with Netscape 4.x. In my opinion this browser is just to old. So please upgrade to a new version. One thing I noticed was that with the difference in behaviour it was most of the time IE vs Opera, Mozilla and Konqueror.

I struggled most with the box padding properties that resulted in different positioning. I almost changed to the use of tables for positioning. In the end I implemented an extra css for IE that corrects the top and left position. The css also corrects the increased font-size in a table, a very irritating bug (or do they call it intended behaviour?!) .
I think that I am fortunate with not a complicated site smile
Posted by Aino at 17:18