> I absolutely agree with you.
>
> However, there's a way to improve the maintainability of CSS. Get rid of
> redundancy! Below are a few examples.
>
> But first the remaining issues. This time I looked carefully in your CSS
> and XHTML. I noticed the following:
>
> a) You do not use XHTML correctly in some places and hence the problem
> with black letters at the bottom of the page. The thing between two
> <hr>'s should be inside <p>...</p>. If you used XHTML strict instead of
> transitional the validator would've reported the issue.
I'm aware of this problem, the footer has been updated on the main site
anyway so this isn't an issue. (I'm just too lazy to run cvs udpate :))
> b) The problem of non-serif bulleted items is related to the previous
> colour problem and Netscape obtuseness. Read more below and notice use of
> ul, ol, and dl below on the line where I define the fonts.
That's a good idea. I'll do that on the weekend (stupid paid work is
keeping me busy)
> CSS designer should use the relative sizes in em
> units (width of a small letter m in a given font). See examples below
> for headings.
Yep, I realise this. the css itself was ripped from 3 sites I wrote in
98. I intend to use em for all the sizes. Just a matter of converting
them all to rational values (I'm not much of a designer so my choices
would be ... ugly :))
> Finally, I'm back to the issue of maintainability.
>
> There are basically two approaches to writing CSS:
I'll use method 2 over the weekend.
> *******************
> To conclude, most browsers are dumb in regard to CSS. We have to provide
> precise definitions for all elements instead of relying on inheritance.
> To increase maintainability, decrease redundancy. Let's hope that one
> day the browsers will understand CSS completely.
This is where my millitancy comes in :). The web will *never* leave its
current state of <font> < ... bgcolor= ... > etc. while people continue
to contort themselves to ensure 'works in [insert broken browser]'.
I'll add the suggestions you mentioned above (they're good and I can see
that they will be maintainable) but any reports of broken rendering with
*that* and I'll just suggest an upgrade or turn off css.
> And both are
> pretty dumb. I remember that IE on Win2000 didn't recognise UTF-8 in the
> first xml line of my strict XHTML doc.
I must admit that's an interesting new bug :)
--
Michael Koziarski
Software Developer
Compudigm International Ltd.
perl -e "print(pack('h45','d69636861656c604b6f6a796162737b696e236f6d6'))"
