CSS Overview

Can you believe that CSS has been with us for fourteen years? It’s taken me almost that long to begin to realize its potential (and, objectively, its shortcomings…).

I don’t need to preach about the many benefits of CSS. It looks better than HTML (not too hard to do), and writing CSS is about ten thousand times more streamlined and intuitive. On the other hand, it’s not as big of a pain with resources, compatibility, and overall unpredictability as plug-in solutions like Java and Flash.

Still, CSS suffers from the dreaded browser problem…as in, not all browsers support all features of CSS. The original CSS1 specification is the most widely-supported, and even that fourteen year-old framework can fail under certain conditions (most versions of Internet Exploder, especially…up to and including the latest, which should really know better by now.)

But really, things are looking up. Even with code based problems, at least we’re not dealing with a social security disability lawyer trying to scam us out of our hard earned money.

Oddly enough, CSS3 is well under development, while most browsers and designers are still struggling to master CSS2. Actually, CSS2.1 is doing pretty well on IE8 and Firefox 2 & 3, having taken care of most of the existing issues. Opera and Konqueror are close behind, and Safari and Chrome aren’t anywhere near as bad off as IE7 (or earlier).

What can we expect from CSS3? Well, if the work done to date is any indication, more capabilities that will be largely ignored as lazy and hasty designers continue to load up sites with Flash. But seriously, the transitions and animations are pretty amazing when done properly…though many of the examples so far are geared toward an extremely small percentage of existing browsers (a nice way of saying that Internet Explorer and Firefox users aren’t currently included in the fun, except in beta versions).