Interview with CSS Pioneer, Christopher Schmitt

[This is a portion of an interview with Christopher Schmitt by Sessions: Online School of Design. The topic of this article is the advantages of using standards-based CSS design for web sites.]

For a hot new thing, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) sure is slow off the blocks. First proposed in 1994, first implemented in browsers in 1996, CSS is perennially touted as the successor to conventional HTML-based Web coding. Its ability to use style sheets to control typography and layout throughout a Web site always seemed to make CSS the most efficient, designer-friendly, forward-looking option. And yet myths persist about CSS -- myths that discourage Web designers from getting to grips with the language.
So what's all the fuss about?

We asked Faculty member and published CSS guru Christopher Schmitt. Christopher's so convinced that CSS should be a part of every designer's Web design toolkit, he devoted two lessons in Sessions.edu's updated Web Design I course to creating CSS layouts.

Q. CSS is getting big enough for prime time, maybe even Letterman. What are your top ten reasons we should all learn and start using CSS now?

Christopher: Here's my top ten in no particular order:

1. Build from the ground up to replace traditional Web design methods. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) created CSS to replace HTML tables, font tags, frames, and other presentational hacks of HTML elements.

2. Faster download times. Reduction of file size is about 50% less than a Web page built with traditional Web design methods.

3. Shorter development time. Easily tweak the design of a thousand-page site with just a few edits of one CSS file.

4. Greater control over the typography in a Web page. I'm a type nut, so CSS's ability to control typography better than a wimpy FONT tag is a wonderful gift. No longer do we need to use the font tag or single-pixel GIFs (SPG) to create leading, change font colors, font families, and much more.

5. It's easy to write. You can create and edit CSS as easily as you can hand code HTML.

6. Improvements in accessibility. Using CSS effectively means structuring content with HTML. With structured HTML -- using

tags only for paragraphs, heading tags only for headlines, tables for only tabular data, and so on -- you increase your audience size without building separate versions of your site.

7. Print designs as well as Web page designs. Create presentations not only for Web browsers, but also for other media like print or PowerPoint-like presentations.

8. Better control over the placement of elements in Web page. 'Nuff said!

9. The design of Web pages is separated from the content. By keeping the design in separate files linked to the HTML pages, you reduce the likelihood of your page designs falling apart over time as different contributors add to the Web page.

10. Better search engine rankings. With only HTML used for structuring content in a Web document instead of rigging tags for design, search engines will spider your Web page effectively, and more likely give you a higher page ranking.