[OT] style sheets (was Re: [SG] David's KraVak rules)

> katie@fysh.org wrote:

They work very well in many modern browsers (IE5+, Netscape
6/Mozilla/other Gecko based browsers, Opera, etc., etc.). And work
very well in old browsers that don't support them at all. It's only a few
intermediate browsers that screw things up (IE3, Netscape 4 and to a lesser
extent IE4).

> I was playing with them a while back, I found that pages look

Yep, that's how it's supposed to work. Web pages are not meant to look the
same on all browsers. Style sheets make suggestions as to the presentation and
browsers apply those suggestions as best they can, maybe in combination with a
user style sheet. So long as the underlying HTML is structurally sound the
style sheets merely add an optional presentation on top of it.

If presentation is more important than content then use PDF or Flash
or whatever instead of HTML/CSS.

> Netscape requires Javascript turned on to run CSS.

Netscape 4.x only. And this is a good thing as Netscape 4's CSS support is so
buggy that many pages are better without it.

> Seriously, CSS involves lots of pain to get everything working right

Not really, I use it every day. I create commercial web sites for a living and
use CSS to implement the majority of the presentation, I just make sure that
Netscape 4 never gets to see those parts of the CSS that it would screw up.
See
http://pixels.pixelpark.com/~koch/hide_css_from_browsers/ for some
simple techniques to hide CSS from the buggy browsers.

> {Disclaimer: I gave up and wrote perl scripts to write massive amounts

Regular HTML is just what you should have before you start applying
the CSS. The problem is irregular HTML - the 1997 era stuff: all font
tags, nested tables and spacer GIFs. Yuck.

Quoting steve@pugh.net:

> Yep, that's how it's supposed to work. Web pages are not meant to

I mean things like I'd say "Do this in white" and one browser would and one
wouldn't... they're fiddly little ill defined things: you can change the text
colour unless it's underlined and in a table and... something else... sort of
thing.

And edit box styles don't change at all in any of the versions of Netscape
I've been near..

> Regular HTML is just what you should have before you start applying

That's what I ended up using, because I couldn't find a set of font CSS
settings that would even look consistent across browsers. Font tags on
everything fits the "when in doubt use brute force" philosophy...

Thankfully I don't have to do that sort of thing anymore, I've been demoted to
dealing with the Windows API instead...