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                A Good Idea Marred by Hideous Implementations

Since I took over the technical editorship of DaveWorld [1] I took it upon
myself to clean up not only the organization of the site, but to clean up the
HTML on the pages themselves. I downloaded the site, cleaned up the HTML and
put it back up on a private site and asked for comments from the more
technically and designed oriented members of DaveWorld.

Number one complaint: What did I do to the fonts?

All I did was remove all the <FONT> tags, leaving the font to be the browser
default. That alone peeved the graphic designers on the list. Back to the
drawing board.

I then decided, for whatever reason, to use style sheets. Exclusively.
Despite the warnings. [2] Meaning, no tables for layout, no <FONT> tags, no
alignment attributes. Just simple HTML.

I've come to the conclusion that Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), defined way
back in 1997, is a lot like Java: A Good Idea Marred By Hideous
Implementations.

My intent was to use correct typographical conventions, one of which was that
the leading paragraph is not indented but succeeding ones are. Easy enough to
specify, along with font information and other stylistic concerns.

Internet Explorer (IE) managed to center the text correctly, although the
paragraphs with leading (indented) were shifted to the right. Netscape had
the paragraphs aligned correctly, but neglected to actually center them on
the page. Also, the interline spacing between paragraphs was off, making the
page look horrible. Adjusting the interline spacing to 1 fixed that problem,
but now the lines were bunched up. Livable. But it still refused to center
the paragraphs on the page.

The only way to get Netscape to center the paragraphs was to use a table.
Which kind of defeats the purpose of CSS. But I tried anyway.

Netscape now aligned the paragraphs correctly, but that just triggered a bug
in IE—the paragraphs where aligned correctly, but selecting a link would
cause the page to jump to the right. What the—?

Try as I might, I couldn't get a stylesheet alone that worked properly
between the two.

Sigh.

[1] http://www.daveworld.org/
[2] http://www.alistapart.com/stories/fear/

Email author at [email protected]

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