Cascading Style Sheets suck.

It is funny to think that we go about our daily lives surfing the Internet, commuting to work, and performing saucy puppet shows, vainly assuming that we know how the world actually works and rest comfortably with our understanding of existence. Yet we remain blissfully unaware of shadow governments, conspiracy plots, global intelligence networks, and clandestine organization which pull the strings that animate our Punch and Judy lives. Counted among such organizations are the Majestic 12, the Illuminati, the Knights Templar, and now the World Wide Web Consortium. These groups all shape our daily lives in ways which we cannot possibly imagine and, in the case of the W3C, sometimes make them a living Hell.

Okay, perhaps that is a bit melodramatic, but I wanted a catchy lead in for what is basically just a small rant about what a pain in the ass it can be to use CSS. I say this because, in an attempt to make WITFITS a more pleasant viewing experience for its combined readership of 4 people, I spent all of last night (from when I got home from work until about 4:00am) attempting to modify the site. That loud whooshing sound some people may have heard in the greater Cleveland area last night was emanating from my apartment. And it wasn't my Flowbee this time, it was the sound of my evening sucking. Hard.

I will admit, Cascading Style Sheets are really the way to go when it comes to web design, especially since HTML was never really designed to do what it is used for. The standard (CSS) isn't bad, although I find the object model a little convoluted (or perhaps just the explanations of it are), and the idea behind IDs and classes effecting how certain tags appear, and the facility of making changes to them without having to change the tags themselves, is appealing. However, I have yet to find CSS particularly easy to use. Every six months or so, it seems, I find myself needing to make modifications to them in one place or another. I must get bit by the web-design bug every once in awhile when I'm between epic PC games or one of my other numerous "hobbies" that never quite pans out. At any rate, it always seems like what I want to do with the design of a page seems straightforward enough, but when it comes down to implementing it I have to wrestle with the style sheets for hours on end, usually without positive result. It was this way last night, I found myself pounding away at the tags over and over and over again trying to do what I thought was relatively straightforward, only to have my hopes dashed repeatedly. In the end, I inevitably reach the conclusion that doing anything with CSS requires modifying half of the classes or IDs defined until I find the right combination of magical properties in each that accomplishes my goal. What's worse is that some 13 years or so after the first GUI web browser, we still have browsers that don't all comply to the standards.

There's a reason they are called standard folks.

The standard meter is the distance light travels, in a vacuum, in 1/299,792,458 seconds with time measured by a cesium-133 atomic clock. The standard professional football game length is 4 quarters of 15 minutes each. The standard pick up line is "What's your sign?" and the standard denial of sex is "I have a headache." These all exist for a reason. And yet here I am cursing Internet Explorer for ignoring my "min-width" tags. Plus I think it sugared my gas tank last night. Whatever, that's life I guess, I just wish it wasn't so damn difficult sometimes to accomplish trivial tasks.

Somewhere Walton Simons and The Cigarette Smoking Man sit in a dark room laughing as they observe my futile attempts at web design. And humor.

Tags: Computers and Internet, CSS, Geek, Humor, Ramblings