On the Necessity of CSS
Here's something that I guess I really finally realized today - you really have to have CSS for even the simplest web pages if you want it to look similar on multiple platforms and browsers. Case in point: I love Coda from the Panic crew for it's clean interface and it's ability to really nicely maintain small to medium-sized web sites. I know it's got limits - it's not a Tomcat build system, for instance, but for what it can do, it does it very well. Well... I was initially looking at the features and thought "Yeah, I can use that... and that... but what's this CSS editor? Well... no harm to have it in there."
Silly me.
I was doing a little, and I mean little, page for work - basically re-working it for a new Perl interface from a very complicated PHP/Java page and wanted to add a little color to the tables of data to make them a little easier to read. So I spent a bit of time just dealing with the table tags and the attributes set there. Looked OK to me in Firefox on Linux. I checked it all in, thought myself done, and went on with my day.
Coming back into my cube later in the day I thought - Hmmm... what's it look like in IE? Ah... now we see that I had remembered from the last style changes I had made - it looks crummy in IE when using the table tags. I needed to simply give in and make the style additions to the CSS for the page and get the two platforms, two browsers looking reasonably similar. Not horribly hard, but it means making a change, then hitting the refresh on three browsers on two machines. Not rocket science, but annoying to get it all done right.
Then I flashed back to Coda... Ah... now I see the reason for it's inclusion. Most folks are doing the same thing I was doing for work and they needed to have that - even on the small sites. On most of the small sites I have I haven't cared a lot about the style on the different browsers and platforms, but I can see that this is changing and it's going to become more important as time goes on. Even the simplest pages will need to have CSS written for them to make them look the same on the two browsers. Looks like I need to spend more time looking at CSS. Not exactly what I think of as 'fun', but it's something I can see now is going to be more important for even the simplest pages.