Dave Burke : Freelance .NET Web Developer specializing in Online Communities

I wish I had that time back (working with CSS)

I remember Sam Gentile when speaking at the Vermont DotNet User's Group saying he wished he had those years back spent working with COM, as technology progressed and COM was no more.  (I'm pretty sure it was COM.  Sorry, Sam, if I got it wrong.)  I felt the same about COM as Sam, after reading 4 Wrox books on the subject before writing my first GetObjectContext.Item() statement.  Then I spent my days and nights for a year thinking I was working with the coolest technology EVER!  But after seeing a demo of .NET Beta 1 at Comdex 2000 and being told that COM was going away, I was so pissed that I didn't crack open another book or do any after-hours coding for 6 months.

But that's another subject.  Now I'm talking about the time sucked away working in goddamn CSS stylesheets.  I'm not a perfectionist, but with this site, dbvt.com, for instance, there is a DotNetNuke stylesheet, a .Text stylesheet, and an nGallery stylesheet, each requiring to have the same settings for a uniform look-n-feel.  Yeah, I could have consolidated them, but it would reduced overall lost CSS time only slightly.

Any web site requires too much time working with CSS, if you ask me.  When I look back on my life I won't regret the time spent coding, studying, reading, working in Photoshop or Illustrator (the latter two have threshold durations where the sucking sound begins, but that's another post.) I will, most certainly, wish I had spent less time dicking with CSS stylesheets.

Comments (2) | Post RSS RSS comment feed

Posted on 9/12/2004 5:21:00 PM by Dave Burke
Categories:
Tags:

Related posts

Comments (2) -

9/13/2004 2:10:00 AM Permalink

The problem isn't CSS at all, it's that you're retrofitting the CSS onto those 3 apps.  

If the HTML produced by .TEXT, etc, was in the format you wanted, the CSS part would be a piece of cake.

The CSS for my .Text blog would be at least 50% smaller if I did the work at the base level instead of overriding the Marvin-2 stylesheet, but I didn't want to mess with the source code so close to the next release.

A designer I work with recently realized I was right when I told him about CSS in 2001.  He wishes he had the last 3 years back because he wasn't using CSS.

[besides, your blog looks too good for you to regret it.  Smile ]

Shannon J Hager |

9/13/2004 8:50:00 AM Permalink

Retrofitting CSS... Formatting at the base level...   I hadn't considered those concepts before. I know at the base level, we should design for flexibility, i.e., skinning.   I'll think more about these things.

Agreed, we don't want to touch the .text source (or ngallery or dnn) more than we absolutely have to.

Thanks for the compliments on the blog.  I've been enjoying my new toybox.

Dave Burke |


Powered by BlogEngine.NET 2.0.0.36
Theme by Dave Burke