Yes, I'm CuSS'ing

I spent the day converting CrimLaw from html tables to CSS. The claim is that it will make the blawg download faster. I can't tell a difference, but maybe it will help one of ya'll.

As to CSS itself, I'm not impressed. It struck me as just being a highly stylized, longer-winded, more formal way to do everything I'd already been doing in plain jane html. The only thing which provided even a little more flexibility was "float" and even that was limited. Of and by itself, it wasn't worth it.

Of course, I wouldn't want to tell that to the author of the book I bought to teach myself CSS. Parts of the book read like a proselytizing religious tract. Thou shalt not use tables or these commands. Thou shalt use blocks and those commands. The only two rational reasons given were the aforementioned increased speed of page loading and improving the ability of programs for the blind to read the page. I'm not too moved by either. I'm not seeing much greater speed - maybe a little, but the page design had to be dumbed down to fit within CSS's parameters (smaller video, removal of bar with credits in it, only one block for cites), so it should be faster. As for the problems with programs to read for blind people, that's a flaw in that program, not in html tables.

I suspect it's like most things. What evolved was messy. There are always people who don't like things messy. These people will put together something that is more formal, trading 50% of their flexibility for 5% improvement. Thus, when I was in high school and everyone was using Basic all the computer wonks were pushing Pascal as a "better" language. I guess some things never change.

As you might suspect by now, I got frustrated doing this today. I'm not satisfied by the blawg as is. Part of this, I'm sure, is that the book I used limited itself to basics (telling me to go buy this or that book for more advanced CSS applications) and I'm frustrated that I don't know the tricks which will allow me to do the things I want to in CSS. I'll learn and hopefully the layout will improve.