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The Continuing Development Of CSS as a Web Standard
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Kadence Buchanan November 08, 2006
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Cascading style sheets were formally introduced by the W3C in 1997 and
in the nine years since have made gradual progress to becoming a web
standard. Although the W3C mandates style sheets instead of HTML
formatting for internal styles, many web designers have been slow to
adopt CSS.
Graphic designers, especially, have been slow to accept CSS since
it does not allow the complex designs made possible by the use of
nested tables without concentrated testing and workarounds. That is
because CSS is not universally cross-browser compatible. The first
release of CSS in 1997 was notorious for breaking on a variety of
browsers. The second, and current, release provides more stability but
still causes unexpected results on older browsers.
In light of the cross-browser difficulties of CSS. many designers
have adopted a hybrid standard, using CSS for styling text but
continuing to use nested tables to structure their pages. This provides
a measure of stability and control to a web designer who does not have
the time or inclination to learn advanced CSS. However, this practice
is severely frowned on by both the W3C and by a small but influential
group of CSS designers who claim that the use of nested tables slows
down page loading and that CSS can, with proper application, create
complex designs just as well as nested tables.
However, many freelance web designers have found that their clients
are unwilling to accept the additional cost and time to create a
completely CSS-based design. This attitude is beginning to change at
the corporate level, however, as more and more sites are redesigned
using pure CSS.
The continuing acceptance of CSS as a web standard has also been
hampered by the popularity of Macromedia Flash as a design tool.
Completely vector-based and imported into a web page by the use of a
plug-in, Flash offers enormous flexibility in creating complex
navigation systems, a historically weak point of CSS. Flash also allows
a higher level of artistic expression than the more limited CSS, which
is primarily designed to deliver information. This has created a divide
in the web design community to the point where there are basically two
camps of web designers, those who use Flash and those who don't. The
debate over the merits of CSS versus Flash has been known to get quite
heated on occasion.
Many have predicted that the third release of CSS will solve many
of the problems hampering widespread acceptance of CSS as a web
standard. However, the third release has been in development since 1998
and is not expected to be completed anytime soon.
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