One Stylesheet To Rule Them All

Mikhail Arkhipov referred me to a post in his blog as a follow-up to my article, Bringing CSS2 to Visual Studio.NET. Apparently, Whidbey will support CSS1, CSS2 and CSS2.1 schemas. That's good news! Actually, his post got me thinking...

Consider, for example, my favorite CSS editor, TopStyle. If you search through its installation directory you will find a number of definitions for various CSS schemas it supports:

• CSS1 & CSS2
• CSS Mobile Profile 1.0
• Internet Explorer 3.0, 4.0, 5.0 (also IE/Mac), 5.5, 6.0
• Konqueror 2.2
• MSN TV
• Netscape 4 (Mac & Win)
• Opera 3.5, 4, 5, 6, 7
• Safe list (!)
• WebTV plus

Impressive, right? No, insane! We're back at square one with (potential) code forks for each browser, the lame "best viewed in..." tag lines of doom and the like. This is not why there are standards in place. They are standards because both developers and designers alike need to quit thinking in terms of browsers and start thinking in terms of structure and presentation. What is it you want to deliver to your users? How do you make sure you deliver it to both able and impaired surfers? Do you want to get into the mess of which browser supports what? You're losing the perspective of your users if you do. You're not seeing a forest behind the trees.

Suppose you "target" IE 5.0. Your IntelliSense doesn't display red squiggly lines and everything looks perfect. Now imagine someone pulls up your site on a PDA. Oops, no, sorry, IE 5.0 only? This is an extreme example but I hope you get the point. It's like as if gas stations labeled pumps for each car manufacturer differently. 89 for Hondas is over here, and 89 for Chevys is over there. Nissans are not welcome, you have your own gas stations. Absurd? But that's exactly why TopStyles of the world have to grease bad design habits.

Get familiar with standards, and there won't be need for dropdowns with a host of CSS and HTML schemas. Don't get oblivious, though: the same page probably won't look the same in Opera 7.50 and Netscape 4. The 4.0 browsers suffered too many imperfections to be taken serious anymore, but still—make pages degrade gracefully in old browsers. Content will still be readable. Users will most likely forgive you for not seeing your flashy banner at the top. They will still get the content they came looking for.