Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 05/03/06 19:30

On Wed, 3 May 2006, ironcorona wrote:

> The W3C have an excellent tutorial:

Well, the W3C do have a few excellent tutorials on selected topics...
but...

> http://www.w3schools.com/css/

Hey, ***just a minute***. They are NOT the W3C (nor, as far as I can
see from their web page, do they make any false claims to be so).

Sadly, although there's an enormous amount of stuff on their site,
it's well known to be riddled with errors of various kinds. A
beginner would not know which the errors were, without reference to
more authoritative sources. I'd be very reluctant to send anyone
there without first assuring myself that they had been equipped with
the necessary sceptical equipment :-}

> If you want your pages to look as good as possible

Well, the w3schools site already refuses to fit in the browser window
that I made available to it by default - so it immediately failed the
test of looking "as good as possible".

And when I switched off my browser's "minimum font size" defence,
their text became so small as to be barely readable in my browsing
situation. They appear to have started from a font size which 70% of
my preferred choice, which is illogical.

It uses an "XHTML/1.0 Transitional" DOCTYPE, which is absurdly
illogical. Did the W3C ever seriously expect that DOCTYPE to be used
for new content? I find it hard to believe. And (on a superficial
inspection) the pages do their layout with table columns having fixed
pixel sizes a la HTML/3.2(spit).

So they sure don't set a good example, from the outset. For a legacy
site with material from the last millennium, this would be quite
expected; but for something claiming to teach good web design, it's
utterly inappropriate in this day and age.

> you should try to learn it.

Certainly one should learn CSS. No argument there.

However, this, quoted from the above site:

|In our CSS tutorial you will learn how to use CSS to control the
|style and layout

is more than a little misleading. On the web, "control" is in the
hands of the reader, and any authoring technique which fails to
acknowledge that will soon find things "rough going".

CSS is used to *propose* (some commentators would go so far as to say
*suggest*) one - or more - presentation(s). An important part of the
significance of that word "Cascading" in CSS is that the author's
proposals are cascaded with user settings, whether via the user's
choice of browser defaults or, with the more sophisticated users, with
their user stylesheet. IMNSHO anyone learning CSS needs to get to
understand that from the outset, otherwise they start off on the wrong
foot (wrongly thinking that they really /are/ "controlling" the final
presentation), and will be doomed to disappointment when they
ultimately have to un-learn that wrong assumption.

On the other hand, someone who is willing to approach the task on the
understanding that web page design is really a "concordat" with their
readers, will not only start off on the best foot, but will find the
results increasingly satisfying as they advance in their understanding
of flexible design. That's my opinion, anyway.

> Good Luck

Indeed :-}

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