[WEB4LIB] RE: CSS-2 question

[Thomas Dowling]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Julia Schult" <jschult at elmira.edu>
To: "Multiple recipients of list" <web4lib at webjunction.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2001 9:21 AM
Subject: [WEB4LIB] RE: CSS-2 question



> >
> > http://www.webmasterbase.com/article.php?aid=379
> >
> > from the Site Point.
>
> Yes, but...
>
> Even when I look at the demo pages in a compliant browser, if the window
is
> small (like it is on my iMac at home as a default, and probably on some
> laptops) the text along the top menubar starts to run together.

Look at the stylesheet.  Absolute, pixel-based measurements continue to be
a dumb idea, even if you repackage them in stylesheets.

>
> The browser stats he uses show that 77-80% or more of users are using IE
5.x
> or higher, or even Netscape 6.x.  Yet when you look at where those
> statistics come from, it is ALL from sites that are counting visitors to
> those sites, which are sites aimed at technology wonks or web site
> designers.  He does add the caveat that the only stats that count for
your
> site are stats from  your site, but I don't see how he can claim any
> pretense to applying those statistics to "the real world" user.

He can claim that because it's in line with what every net-wide browser
tracking service has been showing for quite some time.  Sites like
thecounter.com (see
<URL:http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2001/March/browser.html>) derive
their figures from a large number of sites.

That said, it is incumbent on every webmaster to know local browser usage
and not rely blindly on external statistics like these.  I know, for
instance, that our main web site continues to see about 50% of its hits
from Netscape 4.x--though that number dances around a lot when I look at
hits of people doing "real work" on some of our other servers, and when I
contrast on-campus and at-home use.

>
> Finally, no-tables sounds wonderful.  So when am I going to find the
time to
> monkey with CSS, apply it to all my pages, and create two versions of
all my
> pages, one CSS compliant, one bare bones html?  All that, when what I
really
> need to do is learn how to do database-driven pages, and figure out this
> XML/XHTML thing, and...

Maybe you should sit down with a cup of decaf and figure out how much of
that you really need to master.  Speaking only for myself, I've never
written two versions of the same page, and I've been sprinkling CSS around
since the summer of 1996: that's how CSS was designed to work.  If you
don't want to learn CSS, or really don't have time to do so, get an
editing tool that handles it for you.  Same with XML and XHTML.

Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu