Faruk Ateş declares his love to CSS …

Interview: timo / 19. Juni 2005 /

Faruk Ates Faruk Ateş is a designer, consultant and programmer working for a small firm in the Netherlands. His personal weblog aims at providing more and more ways for people to learn how to create rich and powerful webpages using structural markup and CSS. Faruk is going deeper and deeper into the realms of web accessibility, unobtrusive Javascript and, dare he use a buzzword, AJAX, all in an attempt to improve and innovate the way websites are experienced today.

Why do you love CSS?: I love CSS for its flexibility, its power, its simplicity and complexity. Of course, that doesn’t make much sense on its own so let me explain. The one thing I’ve come to appreciate most about CSS is how flexible it really is. There is little to nothing that you can’t somehow achieve using CSS,
something that is definitely not the case when you resort to tables for layout. CSS lets you through around entire layouts on the fly withouthaving to change anything, anywhere.; It’s also very powerful; not just in what it can do but also in its appeal. Over the past two-three years, CSS has become introduced to vast new audiences and this has spawned tons of new techniques. People have come to enjoy CSS so much that they experiment with it just for the
fun of it! Virtually anyone who gets introduced to CSS is effectively “lured in” - they never look back. Because CSS is fun, and they want to play with it.; Then there is the simplicity of CSS. I know many people will disagree with me and say “CSS is hard!” - and they’re right! But at the same time, it’s also very easy. It just demands a lot of patience and the willingness to constantly research why something isn’t working right. The
syntax is very basic and easy to understand, as are most of its principles. In that sense, CSS is very approachable. It’s just a shame that it’s so very approachable that you’ll want to start real soon with doing more complex things than styling headings and paragraphs a little, and that’s where things go wrong. After the basics, the learning curve skyrockets, which brings me to my last point: the complexity.; CSS is very complex, very crazy. There are often ten solutions to every single problem, making it very hard to know for yourself which is the best one. But, I see that as a continuing challenge and I love CSS for that. Challenges keep us sharp and interested!
What drives you crazy when using CSS?: Browsers, mostly. And the limitations of CSS itself, of course.; It’s very frustrating when you’re working on a lovely design and are finally getting all the CSS done, only to find out that your client still uses IE 5.2/Mac and half the design is broken in that dinosaur of a browser. Wait, did I say dinosaur? That’s not right of course. I wish IE5/mac were extinct…; Internet Explorer has amazed me time and time again with its broken support for CSS. This is a frustration I could definitely live without, but I’ve made my peace so that I don’t end up in the asylum (too soon ;-)).; As for CSS’s limitations: there are still many things that a lot of customers want, or that I myself want, which cannot be done usingconventional CSS. Designs that expand with content, as horrible and disgusting as I may personally find it (”hello, I am a site and my design is 500 pixels wide. Wait, no, 620. 490. 800!”) is still often requested. Or full-width stretching backgrounds. Just now I’ve had a customer tell me that they were disappointed about their design not stretching across the entire screen. What do you say to that? “Sorry, no browser supports the CSS3 specification for stretching backgrounds yet, as it’s not quite finished”?; There are inevitable frustrations you’ll encounter when going into pure CSS design, but the end result is usually so very satisfying. Makes it all worth it.
Why should people write well structured / semantic markup?: For one, to aid themselves as well as others. Well structured and semantic markup is so much easier to maintain, it can really make a world of difference in a project. Having to sift through three layers of nested tables just to find the right cell wherein a font tag is positioned which shows up as the header of that page? Not fun!; But there’s many more reasons, accessibility being the most important one for me. I find it necessary to do my best to allow as much people access on my site, taking all possible objects into consideration: operating system, browser, physical disability… There’s no reason I should
withhold my information, my content, from certain demographics. I can see how there are other situations where this applies (after all, a blind person has no real need for a Photoshop tutorial) but even then, some basic principles apply. It would be friendly to at least allow your blind visitor to know just what the heck your site is about in the first place, so that he or she doesn’t waste time there. I could go on and on about accessibility, but I’ll save that for my upcoming article. It all ties in with well-structured markup, though, and good (or preferrably, best) practices.; The markup we use is the foundation for the product and thus the end-user experience that we deliver. Take the easy (or lazy) route of tables and the experience for a visitor will reflect your decision. Go the extra mile to learn how to write semantic markup and style it with CSS and the overall result will be much better for everyone.

Faruk Ateş declares his love to CSS …

All declarations of love

Suche

About

Twitter

Classics

Falling in love with CSS

Updates

Autoren