September 25, 2005

CSS

I enjoy the theory of CSS a lot: separating the content from its markup makes a lot of sense, and really plays to the strengths of computing and the web. I had a little bit of difficulty making sure everything worked and aligned the way I wanted/expected it to, but I was able to do it in the end.

One frustration I have run into while working on my CSS is that it is sometimes confusing to know which selector is controlling the property that I want to change. For instance, if I want the width of the navigation panel at the top of this page to be wider, should I change the div that encloses it or should I change the individual list elements, etc.? I find myself unsure of how many divs need to be enclosing a chunk of text/content on the screen, and, if there are multiple tags around the object I'm trying to modify, do they all need to be changed, or will just one do? Through trial and error (by commenting lines of CSS code), I've already found that a fair amount of the styles I have defined are superfluous.

For the assignment I decided I would try to explore how much the styles can be used to change the display of a page (a la the CSS zen garden). This gives a pretty good visual argument for the power (and importance) of stylesheets.

I created two identical websites, and by changing only the CSS I was able to make them look very different. The files are here and here. Here is the file with no stylesheet. (And oh yeah: the second link doesn't work in anything but Safari, it seems. Psych psych psych.)

Posted September 25, 2005 11:04 PM. Categories: Assignments , Week 2 | Permalink