CSS Revisited

22 Jan 2009 · 1 min read · Software Dev & Productivity

I've read a lot about CSS back in 2000 or so and had pretty much exhausted the subject. In fact, I'm very proud of my css knowledge. I read the entire CSS1 W3C specification.

But hat was a long time ago. Yesterday morning I started reading CSS Mastery, which I picked up from the Marylebone library for a quick thumb-through. CSS has changed a lot and browsers are more strict in terms of compliance--making some of my layout methods obsolete.

Being an IE4/5 and Netscape designer is a lot difference than a IE6/7 and Firefox designer. Here are a few things I need to break out of the habit of doing:

Using tables for layout (I think in terms of nested tables)
Not declaring my doc-types accurately
Mixing Presentation (width, height, nospan, etc) with markup

I know I'm not alone in these shortcomings, but I've always been a believer that you need to code to current standards, and not just code until it looks okay when you refresh your browser. Otherwise, a new browser gets released and the old forgiving browser you tested on goes away.

Anyway, my eyes are opened after the first few chapters. Question though: will CSS soon be irrelevant in the Silverlight / Flex world?