Ethan Marcotte declares his love to CSS …
Ethan Marcotte is a web designer/developer/something situated in Cambridge, MA. He blogs intermittently as the curator of sidesh0w, and spends much of his time thinking that the float model was a pretty neat idea. Ethan is also the design lead at Vertua Studios, and would like to be an unstoppable robot ninja when he grows up.
- Why do you love CSS?
- This is, I think, a bit like asking a fisherman why he loves his wading boots, or a carpenter why she favors a particular saw: we don’t design for the web because we’re in love with the tools. And CSS, despite its power and usefulness, is just that: another tool. Granted, it’s a powerful, eminently flexible tool, but it won’t do our work for us.
- However, it can help us do our work better than any other techniques else available to us, and ridiculously so. After designing with CSS for almost five years, I still get ridiculously giddy when I can make sweeping site changes by editing one file. And let’s face it: curly braces are hot.
- What drives you crazy when using CSS?
- The day that I understand why padding is outside the box is the day I quit my job, because it won’t get any better than that.
- Oh, and all browsers suck, in their own special way.
- Why should people write well structured / semantic markup?
- If you don’t, you’ll make the baby Zeldman cry.
- Again, it’s all about using the best tool available to us. My markup’s leaner and easier to maintain, enabling me to build sites in half the time those 1998-era
table-driven techniques would require. - Also (and this might be the ex-literature student talking here), I think using markup to describe your content can be a fun, creative process. If you’ve never viewed the source on Dan Cederholm’s SimpleBits, I’d suggest checking it out: he’s taken a hard look at what he’s written, and then applied descriptive XHTML to represent the relative importance and context of each content chunk. Marking up a site in this way can be a difficult exercise for standardistas-in-training because it’s so subjective—but while there’s no clear “right way” to tackle descriptive markup, I think it’s ultimately a truckload of fun.
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