Scott Andrew - lo-fi acoustic pop superhero!

CSS is not for content management.

CSS is purely presentational. You can’t use CSS to pull navigation, databased content, headers, footers, etc. together for the browser. That’s not what it’s for. That’s never been what it’s for.

The same goes for HTML. It’s largely semantic markup. Text within an H1 is a level one heading. The fact that browsers render this in huge, bold type is incidental. CSS allows you to apply visual style and formatting to HTML elements without screwing up the semantic nature of your markup.

What does a FONT tag tell you that’s useful? Do you, the human, really need to know or care that a paragraph is supposed to be in red 12 pt Garamond in order to read it? No? Then why the heck do you need a tag there?

CSS gets the visual stuff out of the way of the information. That’s all. It’s simple. If you can grok HTML you can grok CSS just as easily.

(FRAME and IFRAME? Ah, there’s a pickle. These are neither presentational nor semantic in my view. They’re user interface components and have little to do with describing information. If anything, they say “this document contains these other independent documents over here, check those out instead.” I have a love-hate relationship with these elements.)

And now for the ranty, not-so-nice part.

I’ve gotten some interesting email on the subject, but let me be a little blunt. If you’re not a client-side developer — that is, if your world does not revolve around things like markup, CSS, JavaScript and basically what goes on in the client — I respectfully ask that you sit down and shut up.

Here’s an illustration: I know a handful of PHP, a smidgen of Perl, and I’ve installed Apache exactly once. Do I then go to my IT department and hold forth on the shortcomings of their system? No.

My experience with databases in limited to some messing about with MySQL two years ago. Do I approach my database admin and ask: why should we use Oracle because it’s so hard to grasp? No.

Why? Because they’re the professionals, not I. Why the heck should they listen to me? They sling this stuff around every day. I trust their judgment and assume they know best practices. And when it comes right down to it, I really don’t care how these issues are solved, as long as I can get my end of the deal done.

I don’t see any value in listening to opinions on web standards from people who don’t even do web design, especially when it’s fairly clear they don’t really care. And I’m really tired of seeing web designers and developers being treated as second-class citizens by people who don’t even live in the same world. To them I say: step aside, and let us professionals do our jobs.

Client-side dev is hard enough as it is without people who don’t do web design and don’t care about web design grandstanding about topics they have no real interest in.