Making the Move to CSS/XHTML
When I originally designed gustorres.com, I had planned on creating the site like it’s sister site, rasterhaus.com and like the myriad of other sites I design and hand-code. It’s the way I’ve done it (more or less) since I started building sites in 1995. You mockup in Photoshop. You get client approval. You slice up everything from Photoshop and try to reassemble the pieces using HTML circa 1998. This usually means nested tables and little invisible spacer gifs. I’ve gotten to a point where the work I do renders predictably across the full spectrum of browsers, from IE/Netscape 4 to Safari/Mozilla 1.0.
But something happened… Or more like someone. Jeffrey Zeldman.
I picked up his book, “Designing for Web Standards“. Half the book tells me why I need to come out of the dark ages of coding bloated HTML. The other half tells me how to make the transition of separating content (XHTML) from presentation (CSS). The concept is so thoughtful and intriguing that I find myself getting hooked in. I start seeing what I could have changed in old projects (not a road to go down). I begin to get excited again; the same excitement I felt when I created my first multimedia project using MacroMind Director (not a typo), my first animation using FutureSplash Animator, (now Flash), and my first web pages for the planned company intranet in 1994 (some of us were toying with Mosaic, others with Netscape 1).
I’m no stranger to CSS. I tried embracing it back in the late 1990’s and (along with many others) deemed it “not ready for prime time”. But now it’s different. This is the Web like it should be. Flexible and creative yet still structured and organized for its original intent as a medium for delivering information.
I decided to use what I’ve learned in Jeffrey’s book along with his contemporaries and proponents like Eric Meyer to create gustorres.com. Building the site didn’t come easy at first. Years of bad habits kept poking up as possible solutions, but I’d squelch them before things got too bad. The XHTML conversion was fairly simple, just a few modifications to the way I wrote in HTML. The CSS itself proved (and still does) to be one “squirrelly” beast. Not everyone supports the same aspects of CSS. IE5 doesn’t always render it the same as IE6 on Windows. But the good outweighs the bad on such a wide margin that it’s been worth the effort to learn its intricacies.
I still have plenty to learn about this easier way to develop web sites and I plan to use my own site as the playground. You know, it’s been a long time since I’ve wanted to play.
Thanks a lot, Mr. Zeldman.