The Time Has Come
Well, the time has come. I’ve got to learn XHTML, and I’ve got to learn CSS.
I’m reasonably competent with HTML. I make mistakes, but I can follow what the W3C validator’s telling me and fix them easily enough. But CSS? Well, I can take someone else’s stylesheet, or one generated by a program, and I can actually understand it well enough to fix some of the clunky or malfunctioning or just plain wrong stuff I find. I can also modify it to look like I want. And my stylesheets come up compliant.
But compliant doesn’t cut it with CSS. There are so many ways to achieve roughly the same effect with CSS. I need to be able to find the cleanest ones, the ones that work in the most browsers. And I need to learn those hideous, annoying Internet Explorer for Windows hacks that make the world’s most popular browser functional despite its gross incompetence and serious security issues (please, if you’re reading this, it’s not enough to stop using IE for Windows: you must clean it off your hard drive and send Bill Gates some dog poo by UPS).
I’m feeling encouraged, because I’ve already found a fabulous article which I discussed under CSS Menu Solution. Clean code, an IE hack that works…. so it can’t be as hard as I feared.
As for XHTML… well, that’s just basically super-strict HTML that allows NO margin for error. Mostly, we’re talking “close yer damn tags”, so no revolution there. But a few things I’m learning shock me – the font tag has been deprecated in HTML since like 1998. Well, I’m safe enough because I always, always have specified my font stuff in my stylesheets, which is acceptable. But I started learning web design in 1999, and I was taught the font tag!
Guess you can’t hang out at W3C.org enough if you like knowing what’s going on. There are times I actually prefer not knowing what’s going on, but web design isn’t one of them.
Subscribe to 