Introduction
What a Mess
Rich Styling
Ease of Use
Using Your Styles on Multiple Pages
Cascading
Preparing for the Future
Implementations
Bringing CSS and HTML Together
Summary

Printer Friendly Version

Chapter 1
HTML and CSS

Implementations

Sadly, the major drawback to using CSS is that it was so poorly implemented at first. Through a combination of miscommunication, misinterpretation, confusion, and poor quality control, the first browsers to attempt support of CSS did a rather poor job of it.

The worst offenders are Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.x and Netscape Navigator 4.x. The first in their respective lines to attempt CSS support, these browsers have incomplete, bug-ridden, and quite often contradictory implementations of CSS1, never mind CSS2. These implementations are so bad that it is difficult to consider them CSS-supporting at all. Some of their flaws are bad enough to cause the browser to crash, or even lock up an entire system, when trying to handle some styles.

With Internet Explorer 4.x and 5.x, things did improve. Although not perfect by any means, these browser versions did at least stomp out many of the bugs that plagued IE3, and also added some support for previously unrecognized CSS properties in both CSS1 and CSS2.

Opera 3.5, on the other hand, came out of the gate with impressive CSS support. Confining itself to CSS1, this browser did quite well with the properties that it supported, suffering only a few minor bugs. When 3.6 was released, almost all of these bugs were eliminated, although support did not move past CSS1. Before version 3.5, Opera did not support CSS at all.

As for Netscape's products, the Navigator 4.7 is not significantly better at CSS support than was version 4.0, although it's at least less crash-prone. The only real hope for good CSS support out of Netscape is their Gecko rendering engine. As this was being written, the latest builds of Gecko were quite excellent, and were in fact used (along with Internet Explorer 4.5 and 5.0 for Macintosh) to create many of the figures in this book.

Since CSS is not intended to provide total control over document display, and should allow the page's content to come through no matter what browser is being used, this general state of affairs should not be considered a barrier to the use of CSS. You may wish, however, to warn your users that if they are using browsers of a certain vintage (Explorer 3.x, and perhaps Navigator 4.x) that they go into their preferences and disable style sheets. That way, they'll at least be able to read the content of your pages, even if it isn't styled the way you might have hoped.

Printer Friendly Version

Introduction
What a Mess
Rich Styling
Ease of Use
Using Your Styles on Multiple Pages
Cascading
Preparing for the Future
Implementations
Bringing CSS and HTML Together
Summary