Why use CSS
The design and creation of websites goes around in circles. I remember how inspired I was ten years ago by those wonderful sites created in Director or Flash! In fact I got totally hooked on them and produced some funky pages, sites & presentations.
Then reality hit me. Neither the search engines nor the average users liked them. Apparently, the SEs could not read the files, and people could not be bothered to download the plug-ins. So I panicked. How on earth am I going to recreate my sites without using Flash or Director?????
I stared to experiment with Javascript and Java applets. To be honest they were just too complicated for me and use a lot of scripts. As far as layouts were concerned, I also found tables and cells frustrating - something never worked with them, or if they did work, they worked in IE but not in Netscape and vice-versa. It used to drive me crazy!..
Then I discovered CSS - cascading style sheets. I was suspicious at first - not another non-standard tool that could make my life hell???? I was right, nothing seemed to work properly - or the same old scenario of working in one browser but not in the other kept happening.
Gradually, however, I got used to it, I got the hang of it, I got even quite good at it… and now I’m loving it! Why?
CSS gives total flexibility in designing layouts
You can have many divisions (i.e. what Netscape originally called layers) and position them wherever you want on the page.
Using CSS results in clean pages
It’s best to create an external style sheet and attach it to the pages. This creates a clean HTML or PHP page, that is quick to load and can be read easily by the SE robots.
CSS can be used to make websites creative again
Just check out the Zen garden templates. It’s amazing what you can do with a bit of imagination and some knowledge of CSS. Basically, the coding is the same for all those examples - it’s just the CSS that is different.
CSS versus flash?
My verdict is that the combination of animated gifs and CSS can create just as good and creative pages as Flash can - and, of course, it’s open source i.e. free!
Another good thing about CSS is that it’s now becoming more standardised across the various browsers - so if you haven’t yet given up on tables to position your objects it’s really time for you to learn some CSS! 