Once again I bring you tales of my escapades into the world of some new programming language. This time it’s CSS. For those of you who don’t know, but still care, it stands for Cascading Style Sheets. It allows me to create one document that will govern how all of the pages on my website will look and how their layout is handled. This is an extremely handy feature. If you wanna change something, all you gotta do is change one file and all the pages will listen. It also has some very nice features which allow for the extensive shortening of your html documents.
Let’s say, for instance, that we have a bunch of tables in our html document. Every one of those is the same size, and has the same border characteristics (lots more than that too). Under standard html, you would have to type out all of the width, height, bordersize, etc, etc statements for every table. In CSS you can set up your stylesheet to say that anytime there is a table, it will automatically have these characteristics. Big time and space saving feature!
Now, some of you are thinking, “Ok, that’s great, but what if I want a different sized table?” That’s easy! That’s where the ‘C’ in CSS comes in handy. If you define the size at your table, it will override the previously defined characteristic from the CSS stylesheet.
Anyway, after long consideration, and getting pissed enough at fighting standard html to give me the layout features I wanted. I decided to convert the entire BrainSplosion site to use CSS. I think I like the new design a bit better, and future page implementations will be incredibly easier.
I do have one word of advice for those considering CSS. Do it. Do it BEFORE you make your site. Having your site all set up, and then having to go rewrite everything to work differently is a true pain in the arse. Do it from the get go, or at least while the site isn’t too big.
It can easily take several hours to get the basics of what you want from CSS down including the tinkering to get things just right. I’ve been working on it for quite a few hours now, and just finished.
Despite all the work, I think I will be happy with it, and am glad I’ve done it now, rather than later on when I’ve made my site just that much more complicated. Now I just wonder if I’ll ever get to changing over DigitalNigel.