February 18th, 2002:

A story written by Dennis of 0 (zero) format has captured me. I read it three times at work today, and I’ve read it twice more just sitting here. Though a paraphrase will not do it justice, I will do my best.

Dennis tells the story of a woman named Jennifer, and a man named Harold. Jennifer, in her home only a short distance from Harold, is unhappy in a relationship with a man who clearly has no respect for her and who doesn’t understand her. After a particularly tense moment between Jennifer and her partner, she leaves the house with change clearly on her mind. Harold, being obsessed with Jennifer, a woman whom he has never spoken to, has not stopped thinking of her for over a month. After a particularly intense bout of obsession he, too, heads out the door with change clearly on his mind. Jennifer and Harold are headed for the same destination.

This is well worth the short read.

[Category: GEEK]
I have seen CSS, and it is good.

Maybe it was due to lack of support, or perhaps it was due to time constraints, but, for whatever reason, before now, I had never truly tried to understand CSS, and what it could be used for. Sure, I’ve used it before now. I’ve made my >A HREF=”…”< links change colors when you hover over them. I’ve used it to caption photographs in some cases. I even designed an entire site using CSS for ALL of the layout, only to find that even the browser I used on a daily basis didn’t support everything I was trying to do. However, before now, I had never taken the time to actually learn CSS. I had never bothered to study which levels of support each browser had. I had never bothered to at least familiarize myself with the various formatting options available under CSS. I had never attempted to use even a large subset of them just to see how they worked.

I have now, and I am impressed. The level of thought involved in the creation of CSS, and the amount of flexibility and simplicity it offers are astounding. If any of you are web designers (by hobby or trade), web programmers, web-developer managers, or are involved in the use of HTML in any way, I strongly encourage you to learn CSS and employ it as often as you can.

There is not a lot to learn, and, once it gets rolling, you’ll see that most of the concepts logically make sense which means, towards the end of the learning process, you are skimming more than you are reading. I spent about 2 hours this morning reading 4 or 5 different tutorials on CSS, and, with this knowledge, I am fully confident in my abilities to use it in every possible situation.

I know many of you will not take my advice. But, for those of you who do, pay special attention to which features are classified as CSS1 and which are only found in CSS2. This is important as, depending on the “freshness” level of your audience’s browsers, you may, in some circumstances, have to stick to the subset of CSS afforded under CSS1.

Within a few hours, you be coding cleaner, more maintainable websites, faster than you ever could before. Give it a shot. You were just going to watch TV, download some porn and go to bed anyway. What have you got to lose?

I recommend the following tutorial. It is very well written, reads nicely, and does a fairly good job at explaining complex concepts as simply as possible.

CSS Style Tutorial

Enjoy! And let me know what you think.