MY RELATIONSHIP WITH CSS
My first <table> tag was coded back in the dark days of 1999. This was well into the Internet Revolution but it was still an innocent time when every company was scrambling to make millions on the WWW and I fell in love with HTML.

I fondly recall late night/early morning coding sessions in which I would diligently type into Notepad, save the document and then Refresh my IE browser to view the results and debug anything that was amiss. My first Web pages were crude and unpolished as were most in the early days. The true devil of all my coding was discovering and finding workarounds to all the table bugs across the different browsers.

Time and patience soon led to a mastery of what I refer to as the “table quirks” and soon most all of the little oddities of HTML 4 were well within my capabilities to code around or render insignificant.

I was never a real fan of the spacer gif but even that item soon became a staple in my HTML coding bag.

CSS BACK THEN
There was of course CSS back then and I dabbled in it as most HTML fiends did but everywhere I turned it was dubbed impractical, inconsistent, buggy, niche, etc. CSS was really not supported enough (in the major browsers) to be a viable option except maybe in the realm of typography.

I soon learned that a good style sheet could go a long way to assist in formatting type on the Web. And while there is still much debate over relative or absolute font sizes the <font> tag has truly become a thing of the past.

However, layers, <div> tags, margins, etc. were all still very capably handled by regular HTML tags so I saw no need to scrap all the table skills I’d learned and relearn a new method of structuring content...that is until now.

I have recently realized that the day of CSS has finally arrived. True, I’m again maybe a few months or possibly years behind the "revolution" but I think that for practical Web sites CSS is just now beginning to become truly viable.

What has helped me arrive to this conclusion is studying Web sites like glish.com and alistapart.com. Also, getting my hands dirty in some basic CSS has helped me grasp some of the basic concepts of CSS layout. The fact that most browsers today are pretty much CSS compliant helps greatly. This is probably the main reason I'm diving head first into CSS. Except for Netscape 4 almost every major browser supports at least the basic CSS techniques.

WHY CSS?
Why CSS? Well this question is asked on just about every CSS page and is generally answered with the pros and cons of CSS and concluding that the pros outweigh the cons and that it’s about time anyway.

My reasons for taking up the CSS cause are 99% personal and 1% community-minded. I want to start using CSS because it’s fun. It’s new, fun and is possibly more exciting than when I first started learning HTML. This is partly because CSS integrates smoothly with XML and that is yet another aspect of Web development that is finally coming into its own.

Yes, CSS will potentially make updating my site much easier and it’s “building for the future” but what really has me juiced is the fun-factor.

What fun-factor? Well, here are some examples of what I’m talking about. If these don’t get you equally jazzed then you’ve either already mastered CSS and moved onto XML or DOM coding or you still think CSS is the acronym for Chocolate Syrup Saucers. Anyway, now the examples:

• My own “baby steps” into CSS. This page is created using <div> tags and degenerates on noncompliant browsers. Linked from this page are similar examples that I’ve built as part of the learning process.
• Eric Meyer's complex spiral CSS demo. This site only works in Netscape 6 and IE 5x Mac but it shows what wonderful things can be done when sticking to W3C standards.
• Glish.com is Eric Costello's famous site and has many exceptional resources and links.
• Of course alistapart.com but one little gem is the Backwards Compatible Style Sheet Switcher. A Style switcher that works in Netscape 4.
• Finally the Web Standards Project is a good resource for getting excited about building a truly standards compliant Web.

Now get out there and CODE. Code like the wind amigos.

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