I was just reading through this article on the PC Magazine's site but John C. Dvorak, some hotshot blabber mouth about how he thinks CSS, very politely, sucks! The more I read, the more I was laughing to myself, and although I have no two hoots about making this a rant post, I am personally very tired of people writing or being opinionated about something they very clearly have no clue about!

Why CSS bugs him?

Because he's an idiot. As simple as that. He tries to base his argument on the fact that every browser interprets CSS differently, and hence its not really standard. Well, I guess someone forgot to introduce him to a little something we have had going on for two years now called the Browser Wars! Duh! Every browser does interpret it differently, and thats why every one of them is not W3C standards compliant. Opera comes close, but still doesn't hit 100%. Firefox and IE7 are a long shot, but they're getting there slowly!

His other argument (and this one really cracked me up!) was this. I'd like to quote him just so that people don't say I cheated:

The first problem is the idea of "cascading." It means what it says: falling—as in falling apart. You set a parameter for a style element, and that setting falls to the next element unless you provide it with a different element definition. This sounds like a great idea until you try to deconstruct the sheet. You need a road map. One element cascades from here, another from there. One wrong change and all hell breaks loose. If your Internet connection happens to lose a bit of CSS data, you get a mess on your screen.

ROFLMAOOL!! Next thing which you can expect him to say is that he will not write HTML markup, because if he misses one closing tag, the whole thing will fall apart, or maybe that he'll never code a program for more than a 100 lines, because if he misses a colon, he'll get mucked! That brings me back to my title ... is Dvorak for real?

Everyone loses here, from users who can't under­stand why things look screwy, to developers who can't get CSS to do the job right, to baffled content providers. And what's being done about it? Nothing! Another fine mess from the standards bodies.

Baffled content providers? Mess from the standards bodies? Right! I don't know what third grade content providers he has been in touch with who can't get CSS to work because really, its one of the easiest things. You just need practice. And there is nothing wrong with the standards. That's why they are the standards. Don't blame the W3C, blame the browsers who refused to stick to them!

The best there is

CSS is making it big quite rapidly, with the W3C just recently releasing a draft of the new properties its going to include in CSS3. It's an exciting time for people like us, who (unlike Dvorak) know what we do, and what every change can do for us! CSS is probably the best thing to happen to the field of web designing. It makes life so much simpler when you have to design tons of pages for one web-site!

Let's not bad mouth such a good thing now, shall we? If it wasn't for CSS, the internet would be much less beautiful, and more like the roadkill outside your front door! Just that an article like this appearing on a respected site's page, throws me a little off!

Resources

Why CSS Bugs Me - PC Magazine Article
Digg Article - Read the people's comments
W3C - The World Wide Web Consortium