jeffrey

“You call that development?”

“Well, yeah,” I say.

“I mean, it’s just a string.”

“What’s a string?”

“No, it’s a string in chaos. That’s the logic, a string of chaos.”

“…”

“We speak different languages,” I said.

§

Why do developers refuse to learn CSS? Do they find it boring? Does it pale in comparison to other languages?

I think of it as the icing on a cake.¹

If you find CSS hard, chances are you haven’t implemented stuff to make it easy. Here are a few quick tips.

1. Use a reset stylesheet. These styles lay the foundation of your website.² Paste this CSS from Eric Meyer or this CSS from Yahoo at the top of your stylesheet
2. Use browser-specific styles. Use this bit of JavaScript to append the user’s browser to the body tag.³ If a visual bug is found in a browser, say IE6, create a targeted class to squash that bug. For example,  .ext-ie6 div.box  will only apply this class to IE6⁴
3. Use Firebug. Firebug is an excellent debugger for CSS and JavaScript. It makes fixing errors “easy as”

That’s all you need to make CSS easy.

<sub>1. Icing is the best part, too.
2. Some developers are against them. Ignore those guys. I think most of them play the devil’s advocate to get page hits.
3. This JS forms the foundation for Yahoo’s JS library, Ext. It’s very good, better than Prototype.
4. You do not need to use conditional stylesheets for Internet Explorer nowadays.</sub>