CSS2 and Core Styles

[Roy Tennant]

On Fri, 15 May 1998, Greg MacGowan wrote:

> At the risk of showing my ignorance, I think I see the value of CSS for
> large web sites and for text which uses exceptional styles, such as Tom's
> example. However, I also think that for the vast majority of uses and
> users, there is NO advantage to be gained by using CSS rather than the
> default style sheet. I will continue to read about and play with CSS in the
> event that I can use it in my own work, but I don't see it as quite the
> panacea that some people would have us believe it is. (BTW, and the same
> goes for XML!  (-:   )

When I read this I remembered the time when Gopher was king. Those of us
heavily involved with Gopher didn't see the value in marking up text for
the Web -- there simply wasn't enough payoff for the labor. That was
before Mosaic. All the Web needed to take off was a killer application.
Somehow I feel like we are in the same space regarding style sheets. In my
opinion, style sheets won't take off until XML does. And XML will take off
when the killer application comes along, which could be as simple as XML
support in the major Web browsers (which is almost here, by the way, in at
least a limited way). 

So in a nutshell, I guess what I'm trying to say is this: 1) some of you
may stay where you are for the forseeable future (believe it or not, there
are *still* Gopher sites out there), 2) the majority will eventually climb
the learning curve to style sheets and XML because there will be a clear
and compelling benefit to be gained. Of the second group, there will be
early adopters like Thomas Dowling and others; there will be those who
will follow on and take advantage of the templates and tools they develop
(my guess is that Greg McGowan falls here since he is already "reading
about and playing with" CSS);  then there will be those that put off
learning the new technology until they can't ignore it anymore. Where you
fall is up to you to decide, but if you think that once you learn HMTL it
is now ok to stop learning, you're wrong. You're very, very wrong.  
Roy