Blogs

Will the wonders of the world wide web ever cease? There are a lot of things about web technology that just don't make a lot of sense. A lot of unixisms show through like a bad one-coat paint job. (And not everything about unix "makes sense" either. It's just the way things are done. After all, the internet is a unix legacy.) What many people seem to love about the web is the way all these different technologies can work together to achieve results. My pet peeve is the way they don't work together.

I like to learn new things and when I started trying to change the look of my blog I realized I needed to learn CSS. Up until now I've viewed html and CSS as sort of a output language for tools such as Dreamweaver or GoLive. I figured if I ever was asked to write such a tool then I would learn it just as I learned Postscript once when I was writing some printing routines for a software application I was authoring. Well, I'm in the middle of learning CSS right mow. Or I should say I've learned it but I'm not yet happy with the results. For one thing, the browser incompatibilities are driving me crazy. And, although the stylesheets supposedly support using percentages, or mm, or inches or ems as measurement units, just go ahead and try using anything but pixels. Plus you can introduce errors just by moving html or CSS around. If you want to do anything but the most basic kind of layout; if you are concerned with accessible websites that support different kinds of users, media, and platforms; or if you want to do something a little out of the ordinary, then forget most of the stylesheet attributes and get back to Photoshop to do your work. Anyway, that's how I feel today. Maybe I'll get excited about CSS again tomorrow (or when my blog is actually looking the way I want it!)