Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan and big supporter of CSS, but sometimes it just seems impossible to get things going the way you want.

As indicated in a earlier entry, I’ve been messing with ImageMagick and adding some pictures to this blog. As part of this process, I did a slight redesign of the left-hand column…and all hell broke loose.

I don’t think it’s CSS’s fault – it’s mainly a problem with implementation: I can get it to work perfectly in IE with one set of code, perfectly in Netscrape with a similar – but different – set of code.

And – to be honest – when it comes to positioning and all that, I’ve a lot of experience but I’m not certain which set of code is the W3C compliant code for what I’m trying to do.

If either set is.

Very frustrating.

Dave Winer writes frequently on this subject, and while he is a little too negative for my taste on CSS, I think he has a point.

Usually, he’ll be going through something like I went through yesterday and it just won’t work (across browsers). While someone will usually take the challange and produce the code to make what is spozed to happen happen, it’s not intuitive or sensical. There are often lots of hacks necessary.

This is not good, and it’s frustrating to Dave because he is a programmer. For programmers, while there may be many ways to do the same thing – generate a random number, for example – and many tools in which to do so (PHP, Perl, Python, C, C++…..), at the end of the day you’ll have a routine that will generate a pretty good random number.

With CSS, it’s almost a crapshoot.

For fonts and such, it rocks and is very stable. The sizing issues, and other browser-specific differences are still evident, but this is more of a variance of appearance issue, not a completely different appearance issue, the way positioning is plagued.

But CSS support is getting better in browsers, but that’s still frustrating: While CSS is now widely supported, not all of CSS is widely supported, and in a consistent manner.

While things have improved, we’re still mired – to some degree – in the Browser Wars. Except now the war is not over installed base (IE won dudes; get over it), but CSS support.

One step at a time…