I hardly use <font> tags anymore. CSS is quickly becoming a widely accepted standard, besides, its so much more convenient. Styling with CSS is also supported in SVG, which is a big part of one of my upcoming projects.
CSS is wonderful as it stylizes everything. But because its unsupported by some browsers and has problems with others, it causes a fault in web design usability.
Should I exploit the full uses of CSS, or should I just use the 'safe' options?
Or should I detect the browser and change?
CSS is the future. Style tags such as FONT, B, U and attributes such as COLOR, ALIGN and the like are being removed from the HTML specification.
HTML has gotten too complicated and it is being simplified, not only so its easier to make a standards compliant browser but also to make it easier to integrate into powerful technologies like XML. In the future you will have to use CSS for your formatting and since 97% of the Internet World uses a browser that supports the basics of CSS the best time to start using it is now.
CSS is great just to mess around with, you can make a few lines of text look really colourful and so on, but the main problem i find with it is that on ie if you use a backround colour for text it makes the whole line that colour and if you do it on netscape it only does the text, also i use it for a mouseover with text on netscape it doesnt work why cant they all just meet in a room and work together!
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work why cant they all just meet in a room and work together!
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Funny thing is they all sit in a room and come up with these standards, yet no one seems to be able to implement them.
The problem with Netscape is its base code is 5 years old and you can't patch code and release upgrades if your system isn't design to be upgraded. When Netscape Navigator 1 was released, it wasn't designed to be improved, it wasn't modular and it didn't have expansion capabilities. This was done for simplicities sake, they could take one set of code, change a few switches and compile it for any Operating System. Unfortunately this causes problems in its own right.
With Netscape 6 they are trying to rectify this problem and make it more like IE, meaning its easier to upgrade, modular and optimized for each operating system. Netscape 6 also supports the 5 major standards (X/HTML, CSS1, XML, DOM1, Ecmascript 2.62 otherwise known as Javascript) available today. It also will support parts of CSS2 and DOM2.
With the addition of XHTML to the scheme it should make it easier for browsers to conform to new standards without the need for constant upgrades.
I think CSS is great, I haven't been using it lately on some of my sites because I need them to look and perform exactly the same in all browsers, but I usually do use it.
I can't wait till CSS2 gets fully implemented as it will come in very handy for some of the work I do which is mainly for charity sites and sites that may have a high percentage of people with disabilities and CSS provides a mechanism for providing multiple style-sheets e.g. One for speech browsers, one for brail-based browsers etc.
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Karl Austin KDA Web Services
"Everyone has a photographic memory. Some just don't have film."
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