A Blast from CSS Past

An older article recently dug up talks about CSS in a rather negative light:”In his book “Cascading Style Sheets”, Eric Meyer (no relation) says that CSS is easy to use.

I don’t agree.

CSS uses a complex “cascade” to determine which rules apply to an element - something that takes fifteen pages in a book to explain.

As a result, there is no good authoring tool experience for CSS. Instead of direct manipulation, drag and drop, and visual design surfaces, web designers working with CSS must crack open their code-editors and start typing in text rules. CSS was not designed with drag-and-drop authoring in mind.

Code editors are not easy to use.

For example, consider these rules:

h3 > strong { color: red; }
h3 + strong { color: green; }
h3:first-child { color: blue; }

Quick quiz: What color will this be:

<h3><strong>Hello World</strong><h3>

?

How do you explain this to a visual designer? You need a good debugger and a lot of time to figure this stuff out.”

Read Jon Meyer’s Full Article on Cybergrain

It’s true that since this article was written in 2004 there have been editors released to assist designers through drag-and-drop and other visual design tools. Still, interestingly enough, any visually inspired beginner with no programming experience is likely to have their heads spin while trying to create a simple laid out web page using Cascading Style Sheets.

It raises the question, can the fields of design meet with the thorough and technical nature of computer language peaceably? CSS has taken over as one of the forerunners in web design since it was created because of the ease it allows in maintaining page layout. What might the next step in web design be if a method were developed to fully unleash the power of a designer’s vision, without having to rig up a merely acceptable solution using creation software?