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November 07, 2003
The Art of Design
For the first time, I am really excited about CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). I mean, sure, I've been using them for years now, but now that I've seen what they can really do and now that modern browsers are really supporting the CSS standards, I am starting to appreciate them.
Unfortunately, good CSS still isn't trivial, and I'm not sure it will ever be. But with good enough tools, it can be. Dreamweaver MX 2004 really make a concerted effort to improve their development environment towards supporting CSS, and it appears they've done a decent job. Apart from the program being about as stable as Sam Kinnison on a coke binge, it has helped me develop more CSS dependent (and therefore less browser/OS dependent) sites.
The real issue, however, is at what point do I, as a university webmaster, decide when to stop supporting non-CSS compliant browsers. Or, more accurately, when I do stop adding tons of extra code to specifically support non-CSS browsers like Netscape 4. It was a great browser for its time, but its time is LONG gone. Unfortunately, there is still a significant portion of the site's traffic that still uses NS4 (8ish %). There has to be a time to move people off ancient architecture, OSes, applications and browsers.
Posted at 07:54 AM | Web Site Stuff | Comments (0)