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Thursday, December 22, 2005

Why CSS?

If you've been poking around WebLens, you'll know that the site has recently been overhauled, making full use of CSS cascading stylesheets. CSS provides the ability to make site-wide changes quickly and easily, and to alter look and feel with minimal effort. Stylesheets allow designers to separate content from presentation, and to create web sites that are surprisingly elegant.

Best of all, CSS means that web designers no longer need sacrifice accessibility for sophistication. CSS-based design has been hailed as next-generation web design, and is quickly making a purely HTML-based approach archaic. As web pundit Todd Dominey points out in his amusing and informative blog, What Do I Know?, all the "layout hacks" we are accustomed to, including transparent GIFs, hard-coded line breaks, and nested tables, will soon be history.

If you're not aware of what's possible with CSS, have a look at CSS Zen Garden for inspiration. You may also want to check out the new book by Dave Shea (the brains behind Zen Garden) and Molly Holzschlag. The Zen of CSS Designprovides a tantalizing look behind the scenes of some of the Zen Garden designs. And I have links to some excellent resources on the WebLens Web Design page.

2 comments:

D McConnell said...

Thank you for explaining CSS so succintly and clearly. Yours is the best I've found yet.

Pam said...

Thanks for your kind words. Please feel free to spread the word! There'll be lots more here on CSS. In the meantime, clicking the CSS|HTML category will pull up all the posts on this topic to date.