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Re: CSS Philosophy

Subject: Re: CSS Philosophy
From: Isaac Rabinovitch <isaacr -at- mailsnare -dot- net>
To: techwr-l
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 11:04:57 -0800

Sean Hower wrote:

You're using a valid css, so I don't see a problem.

Certainly Guy's CSS is valid and should work. It *does* work, except on my beta browser.

The question I'm raising is kind of subtle and philosophical. CSS replaces the functionality of all the BODY-level tags that are deprecated in HTML 4. Now, there's nothing to prevent you from taking this a step further and doing *everything* with DIV and SPAN, using CSS to implement all the features of tags like P and EM.

That's a bad idea for many reasons. The biggest of which (at least in my mind) is that you're placing too much reliance on browsers interpreting your CSS correctly. You do have to trust the browsers to some extent (more than I'm comfortable with given the haphazard support for CSS.) But Murphy's Law implies that you shouldn't rely any more than you have to. So you don't use CSS for features that are built into non-deprecated tags.

Tables have a kind of ambiguous status. They haven't been deprecated, because they are appropriate for many things. But they're also widely misused. I'm arguing that in this particular case, a table is the right choice.

Then again, making the right choice in this particular case is probably not as important as I'm making it sound.




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