arkitrave :: log

CSS is Worthless isn’t exactly about CSS being worthless, but it is an excellent summary of what I’ve been working on at my job for the past year.

When I was hired, I was known as a CSS designer. When I was asked to give a presentation to the company, it was supposed to be about CSS. I talked about HTML instead, only touching on CSS at the end.

HTML is the foundation of everything we do on the web. If the underlying markup isn’t pristine, no amount of window-dressing is going to compensate for it. Developers tend to go out of the frying pan and into the fire when they learn CSS, substituting non-semantic nested divs for non-semantic nested tables.

I’m pleased to say we’ve made great strides in the past year. Active Gear is a small site, but uses not only mostly standards-compliant code, but semantic HTML which (I hope) does a reasonably good job of marking up the content.

This wouldn’t have been possible without some great developers, who were willing to work with me to modify some server-side code to generate better markup. For example, there’s a server control which generates the thumbnail images and names. The old version of this control is table-based and completely non-semantic; the new version uses definition lists to communicate the meaning of the data. Bottom line - the site looks good naked as well as fully-clothed.

This is also the first site to use a new javascript class I have been working on for standardizing product and thumbnail page behaviors. Good markup makes scripting a lot easier as well!

If you think you need to learn more about CSS, go retro and learn more about HTML first. (Or unlearn what you learned in web design school.) Start thinking about semantics first, style second. HTML is the new CSS.