I’ve noted before that CSS is frustrating at times, yet a great tool with great promise.

Of course, one usually notices the flaws, not the goodies. Here’s a message of both:

• Frustration: Yes, I should have checked and all that, but apparently — for what I’m aiming for (HTML 4.01 STRICT and CSS2), underscores are not acceptable characters in class/ID names. This is new to me. Very non-Unix, which the W3C seems to follow (with my support/understanding, mind you). Turns out that a class I had in this blog still worked fine, but failed the W3C’s CSS validation. I don’t want that. Ouch. Yes, should have tested earlier, but it was not that bad. But why is underscore “_” bad? Interesting.
• Great (promise): OK, I discovered that I screwed up, but thanks to style sheets — and good architecture (the classes affected on other sites limited only to the header and footer files. Trivial) — it was a quick fix. Would I have rather NOT had to fix it? Sure! But did the entire nature of style sheets vs. content make this a billion times easier? Yep.

End of rant…