Is CSS safe?

[haxhia]

Hi,
I want to know what you people think about CSS. Do you think it's safe to use in a web site. I'm asking because it's not compatible with older browsers and I want everyone that visits my web site to see the same thing and same formatting, not those that use netscape 3 to see some crappy page and those that use 6 to see a nice one.

Thank,
Gëzim

[cfm]

Hello,

Basically, anything above V4 is safe to use with W3C CSS. Since most people use V5 or V6, it's almost certain that you can go ahead and use CSS.

Aditionally, you can implement methods that make non-CSS-compliant browsers still read the content. Just do a search for "CSS accessibility."

Compuwhiz7

[Jeff Lange]

Basically, I don't support any browsers below IE5, and Netscape 6.

If you can't be bothered to upgrade to at least a browser newer than 7 years old, you deserve to get a piece of junk website.

[Crazybanana]

Originally Posted by Jeff Lange

If you can't be bothered to upgrade to at least a browser newer than 7 years old, you deserve to get a piece of junk website.

I totally agree, and cant say it better myself.

[pissant]

Originally Posted by haxhia

Hi,
I want to know what you people think about CSS. Do you think it's safe to use in a web site. I'm asking because it's not compatible with older browsers and I want everyone that visits my web site to see the same thing and same formatting, not those that use netscape 3 to see some crappy page and those that use 6 to see a nice one.

Thank,
Gëzim

which is more important a usable site to the eight people still using netscape 3
or to the growing numbers using PDAs and telephones (xhtml enabled rather than wap)?

Your site content can still be accessible to all with just the css friendly browsers getting the benefit of design.
After all there are still some lynx and netscape 1.1 users out there! With CSS (and valid semantic xhtml) you support them too!

[John Colby]

Originally Posted by haxhia

Hi,
I want to know what you people think about CSS. Do you think it's safe to use in a web site. I'm asking because it's not compatible with older browsers and I want everyone that visits my web site to see the same thing and same formatting, not those that use netscape 3 to see some crappy page and those that use 6 to see a nice one.

Thank,
Gëzim

If we all followed that argument, we'd still be writing web pages for people who refused to use anything other than quill pens.

Have a look at browser statistics - they'll tell you what people are using. You cannot be all things to all people - get modern and up to date with XHTML 1.1/1.0 and CSS2 - you'll satisfy more people that way.

[TheOriginalH]

Pretty much what the others have said. I cater for ALL browsers...even the "crappy" old ones. But the site does not "look" the same in all of them. It doesn't look bad either - just far more basic, which is ultimately the browsers fault. The sites remain fully functional, and even let the users know they're missing out on a far sexier experience, but not on any functionality.

[vgarcia]

What H said. My sites look and work all whiz-bang in newer browsers like Opera7, Mozilla, and IE6 (well, they degrade nicely to IE6 at least ), but the content is accessible to any browsing device. I even viewed my site on a mobile phone for the first time a few days ago. It worked perfectly with just the XHTML 1.0 markup; no secondary WAP site was needed at all.

[cfm]

Hello,

Yep. Saying a that you want your site to look exactly the same on all browsers isn't just idealistic, it's impossible! It also brings in the issue of WYSIWYG publishing, because people have come to believe that using click-and-drop publishing tools, what they see is what everyone else will see.

What makes a good site "accessible" is not looking identical in all browsers, but rather conforming to each browser's limitations but still providing the content.

Compuwhiz7

[haxhia]

I guess you guys are right. I remeber sometime ago I was trying to install MSN 5 or so, on my P100, that didn't work because it said my IE is too old! So those people that have crapy hardware they know that they're not getting the most out of the Web, and my site is not gonna be the first one that's gonna be funny looking.

Thanks to all of ya.

[kish]

Originally Posted by Jeff Lange

If you can't be bothered to upgrade to at least a browser newer than 7 years old, you deserve to get a piece of junk website.

LOL!! its so true!

[JMulder]

I am going with Jeff's statement here. The internet is a moving train, not an old rusty one standing in someone's backyard and show his latest flowers. Move along with the train and you'll be fine, afterall, it costs nothing. The reason for not upgrading are ignorance and lazyness. Sure, in some cases your employer doesn't allow you to upgrade .. but then again, anyone who does that is stupid too.

[blufive]

In many ways, well-done semantic HTML/CSS website will probably look much better in really old browsers than a multiply-nested-tables-tag-soup-attributes-everywhere site will.

For a good HTML/CSS site, the version 4 browsers are the worst case scenario, since they try to do CSS and just chew it up. The version 3 browsers, however, will (hopefully) just ignore the CSS altogether, and present old-fashioned plain vanilla HTML. Get the underlying HTML sensible, and while it may not look pretty, it's perfectly readable.

[pissant]

future future future!
I mentioned it above too, but while many people keep worrying about compatability with older browsers we also have to remember that newer browsers and platforms (handhelds etc) benefit hugely from good structured (semantic!) standardsey (x)html

[BenANFA]

Actually CSS2 is not exactly cutting edge technollogy, I believe I am correct (or nearly correct ) in saying that the CSS2 spec was released in 1998 o it's arround 5 years old itself (although of course having been released it would have taken the broswer makers some time to decided to addopt it).

A not on PDA's, I was doing some checking up for work the other day and it would seam that PDA's throw another spanner in the works of CSS. Pocket Internet Explorer (the browser released on PocketPC 2002 PDA's) does not support CSS positioning attributes. Internet Explorer for Windows CE is better but I believe still does not have full CSS2 support.

I do not know if there are any other broswers available to PDA users but it would seem that your web pages are unlikely to appear as designed on a PDA. In addition, as I understand it PIE can be configured to squish the page into a single creen.

[John Colby]

Originally Posted by BenANFA

I do not know if there are any other broswers available to PDA users.

Opera?

[DougBTX]

Originally Posted by BenANFA

it would seem that your web pages are unlikely to appear as designed on a PDA.

All I can say is do the maths

My screen: 1152px wide
You average PDA: 320px wide

How could it look the same??

Anyway, just had a pop to the Opera site, and the Motorola A920 (whatever that is) apparntly uses Opera as its browser, in which case you'll get a good feel for what your site will look like there if you fire up regular Opera and hit Shift+F11.

Douglas

[sl_19]

css is very effective to design cross -browser pages above a version

[pissant]

Originally Posted by BenANFA

Actually CSS2 is not exactly cutting edge technollogy, I believe I am correct (or nearly correct ) in saying that the CSS2 spec was released in 1998 o it's arround 5 years old itself (although of course having been released it would have taken the broswer makers some time to decided to addopt it).

A not on PDA's, I was doing some checking up for work the other day and it would seam that PDA's throw another spanner in the works of CSS. Pocket Internet Explorer (the browser released on PocketPC 2002 PDA's) does not support CSS positioning attributes. Internet Explorer for Windows CE is better but I believe still does not have full CSS2 support.

I do not know if there are any other broswers available to PDA users but it would seem that your web pages are unlikely to appear as designed on a PDA. In addition, as I understand it PIE can be configured to squish the page into a single creen.

PIE is a mixture of IE3 and 4, with a few extra bits thrown in. It basically understands html3.2 and most of html4, the JS support is weak and supports more of the jscript dom rather than ecma dom
However currently designing for PDA support involves designing around the issues, and providing usable pages, not identical ones.
Most small screen browsers have some capacity for rendering tabled layout, but the results are highly unpredictable and usually have poor usability. Whereas well structured (x)html shows up exactly as expected.
There are a couple of other browsers available for pocket pc, at least a dozen for palm and several native browsers for the symbian OS. Plus the excellent opera browsers for symbian which has good css1/2 support (but still not full support of the DOM)

As for css2 not being cutting edge, well it is the latest spec defined...
css3 is still in the development phase. The first browsers to support css2 came out around 2000 (ie5 for mac) and now most modern browsers have good support for css2, although IE/win still falls behind, but with a knowledge of limitations it is still useful

[inababes]

i agree with what everyone else said. designing for the future is much more important than designing for outdated browsers. as long as the content is accessible for older browsers, then that's good enough for me. if you want to see all that eye-candy, then its time for an upgrade.

[DougBTX]

Originally Posted by haxhia

Do you think it's safe to use in a web site.

Another thing which is important to mention: CSS is more powerful than table based layouts.

You can do things which were impossible before: you can really mess up if you want to.

In terms of safe (Where unsafe = the design falling apart), depending on how you make your layouts, it can be much more robust than a table based layout, or much weaker. The choice is your's, but you do have to learn how to make that choice.

Douglas

[AlexW]

The worst case scenario is PDAs and phones actually trying to render CSS that has been written for browser display. If your HTML structure is good it should just interpret that and ignore the CSS, for the same reasons services like Avantgo strip tables out of sites. They make no sense in that environment.

Imagine if a Palm tried to render SitePoint's 3 columns across 320 px?! That would be about 64px (or 4-5 characters)for each side column. In fact Ian Lloyd describes exactly that problem in relation to the new HipTop PDAs.

[lloydi]

Originally Posted by John Colby

Opera?

Not that I know of. But there are other browsers out there for PDA:

http://pdacentral.ozbytes.net.au/palm/browsers_pop.html
http://pdacentral.ozbytes.net.au/poc...r_default.html

NetFront supposedly supports CSS too:
http://www.access.co.jp/english/ppc/

Apart from that, info is patchy

[vgarcia]

Originally Posted by AlexW

Imagine if a Palm tried to render SitePoint's 3 columns across 320 px?! That would be about 64px (or 4-5 characters)for each side column. In fact Ian Lloyd describes exactly that problem in relation to the new HipTop PDAs.

Totally agree. My work site is pretty hard to read on the HipTops, and it still doesn't understand XHTML.

[Cam]

Originally Posted by DougBTX

fire up regular Opera and hit Shift+F11

Wow! That's awesome!

SPF looks prety good, my site looks better than I thought it would although I'm still thinking about some improvements. It just doesn't display images that are too big, which is a good thing IMO.