For Those Afraid of CSS and Standards
If you’ve been feeling a bit timid about the whole CSS thing, A List Apart’s Ben Henick offers 12 Lessons for Those Afraid of CSS and Standards.
It’s a great primer for those diving into their first Web Standards project and a nice review for seasoned CSS/Standards code wranglers.
Here’s a quick rundown of the 12 lessons:
- Everything you know is wrong—sort of
- It’s not going to look exactly the same everywhere unless you’re willing to face some grief—and possibly not even then
- You will be forced to choose between the ideal and the practicable
- Perfection is not when there’s nothing to add, but when there’s nothing to take away
- Some sites are steaming heaps of edge cases
- Longer lead times are inevitable
- Coherent and sensible source order is the best of Good Things
- Descendant selectors are the beginning and end of genuinely powerful CSS rules
- In the real world, stylesheet hacks will get your project across the finish line
- Working around rendering bugs is like playing Whack-a-Mole
- When you’re drowning in CSS layout problems, make sure of the width and height of the water, float without putting up a struggle, and get clear of the problems
- Background images will make the difference between the plain and the tastefully embellished
Does anyone know what an “edge case” is, exactly?
Steve: Not entirely sure, but it doesn’t sound like you’d want a “steaming heap” of one anytime soon.
Hey, Steve. Thanks for linking to my article.
And since there seems to be some confusion - in the context of the article, an edge case is a tiny slice of the spec that only turns up once or twice on the site. In the scenario presented, such edge cases often require long rules, with four-plus attributes set. The functional result is a stylesheet that not merely violates, but actually rapes the KISS Principle… and is consequently difficult to write.
In statistics and economics they call it an outlier - a datum or sample that throws off the mean for the population and makes it worthless.