I can write HTML code in my sleep. (Sometimes I think I actually do; I've had dreams about doing web pages.)

But right now CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) still look a bit like Spanish to me.

I say Spanish because I know a little bit of Italian and often the words are similar. "Thank you" in Italian is "grazie" and in Spanish "gracias." In a similar manner, I can go into the template for my blog or James' blog, for instance, and change colors and fonts and underlines. I pretty much can change what I'm looking for, but I haven't attempted to write it myself the way I did with HTML almost immediately.

To that end, I bought Osborne's Cascading Style Sheets: A Beginner's Guide from the bargain book shelf at MicroCenter on Sunday. I have other books with CSS in them, including my favorite general reference, Elizabeth Castro's HTML For the World Wide Web with CSS and XML (fifth edition), but I thought a book strictly for CSS might help.

Unfortunately I'm still staring askance at the list of reasons why one should use CSS instead of HTML. One of them is "CSS allows for precise positioning." Be nice if it was true. One of the problems with HTML is that it shows up differently on different browsers. If you leave a table tag off, sometimes IE can cope with it, but Netscape will hiccup. Material that is nicely spaced in Netscape looks double spaced in IE. It's a pain in the neck. CSS is therefore touted as something that will make this problem go away.

Well, so they say. James has a friend at work with a blog. He chose his template from Blogger's assortment. I would think this would mean Blogger had tested each of these things cross-platform (aren't I nice to be so optimistic?). Evidently not. Since he knowsJames called me yesterday and said, "Could you look at the template in Harry's blog? The sidebar is suddenly pushed all the way to the bottom."

So I pulled up Harry's blog. Surprise! Looked fine in Firefox, which I'm using as my default browser now. Looks good in Mozilla, too. But in IE (which of course they use at work), bad news. The sidebar which should have been on the left of the page was under the text! Nice going, guys. So much for CSS's touted cross-browser compatibility.

Not to mention that most of my pages, with their nostalgic subject matter, might appeal to older people who don't have up-to-date computers or browsers. Most CSS pages look like hash on older browsers, even something as "recent" as Netscape 4.78. Right. There's something I really want to do: present people with a web page that looks like the dog's breakfast.

Ah, well, even with the simplest tools there seems to be technological problems. Why should I be surprised? :-)

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 11:23:00 AM

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