Re[4]: HTML and CSS

[Arlen P Walker <Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- JCI -dot- COM>]

      But that's a lot of work for a very small percentage of the
     visitors. CSS doesn't do much that can't be done other ways, it is
     useful mostly as an easier, more reasonable way to do it. But if you
     have to do both, what's the point?

I agree. But having said that I'll also say that I'm thinking of setting
up a site with CSS1.

The best way to be sure the page "degrades gracefully" is to do it first
with whatever level of HTML you want to be your minimum supported level.
Once you have the page done that way, then go back and add whatever CSS1
stuff you want to it. This way you know the site will display in the lower
version, and it will still work in the CSS-enabled versions.

This means a lot of hand-coding, usually, as very few code generators will
do that for you.

One of the things you can do to reduce the duplication of effort is make
the lowest level design very primitive (no multi-column text, no placed
images, no tables used for layout control) and do all the real layout work
in CSS. It means the non-CSS types that come will get a simple layout, but
that may be an acceptable trade-off now, and it will certainly become more
acceptable as time goes by, when the only folks still using the non-CSS
browsers will be those who are looking for faster DL speeds, anyway.

But the utility of CSS is still too low for me to think about using it
without a very good reason.


Have fun,
Arlen
Chief Managing Director In Charge, Department of Redundancy Department
DNRC 224

Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- JCI -dot- Com
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