There is an interesting article and message thread going on at Live Journal — an article by Jamie Zawinsky.

Basically, the article is a rant against CSS (why it doesn’t work as well/like tables/font tags etc) and CSS supporters (“Web designers, and especially blogging web designers, are self-important fuckheads” and “dumbasses” ).

And I guess I fall into the “fuckhead dumbass” category because I like CSS – but I do realize it’s limitations (browser incompatibility; positioning issues and the lack of a true table-like column structure are the big three to me) and get frustrated by it.

A lot of good points are brought up — and some good code/insights shared, but I think some salient points were missing.

I would have commented, but you had to create a profile and all that. I don’t care that much – and the world/thread is not going to be a poorer place without my pearls of wisdom…

What was missing:

• CSS is new; font and table tags are old — If the tables (pun intended) were turned, and TABLE and FONT tags came out after CSS had been around for years…well, I don’t think they would even be used for the most part. Tables for columns, maybe. But why use the FONT tag? It would seem idiotic to assign a million different FONT tags when you can do it with one style, a few lines of CSS code. It’s only because we have been using table/font for year that we are so familiar with them. And like all humans, web developers hate change. CSS is cool is some ways, makes you tear your hair out in others, but it is something new to learn, which many don’t like.
• CSS is new – While the standard goes back to 1995, I think, it has only really been embraced over the last year or two because the browsers never really caught up until then. So this is new stuff – and there are going to be learning curves for developers and those who develop/support the standards.
• If it is so bad, why is so widely embraced (now that all browsers sans Netscrape 4.x give pretty good – but not equal – support to the standard)? While the CSS supporters do have more than a few CSS fanatics (fuckheads/dumbasses….) in their numbers, this is even more true for Mac users/supporters. Should we toss out Macs, as well?
• The thing that kicked off Jeff’s rant was the problem with adding CSS code to make his pages more printable (so white text on lite blue could be read when someone printed them out) – Let’s put this in perspective: Even if this was a difficult problem (it isn’t), it’s not something that is even available in the “old school” of formatting. He’s bitching that CSS sucks because it’s work to make something work that he could never get to work in the non-CSS world (unless you had a separate print version page). Isn’t it worth the effort? Isn’t it cool that it is possible – however currently imperfect the process – to do so?