Time for spring cleaning: Jill has a redesign in the works, while Anja has closed shop for redecoration. While designing, Jill struggles with Cascading Stylesheets (CSS.) No wonder.
I strongly encourage CSS, but I still find it a bit counter-intuitive. CSS is made by a computer scientist, and it's very code-oriented. Object-oriented-like, any element is an object, which inherits its looks and everything from ancestors. Quite geeky, but it works.
Trouble is, designers don't think that way. (You know that: Designers make posters, engineers make toasters, the saying goes.)
I don't think the major reason CSS has taken so long to catch on is the lack of browser support. I designed Web sites with CSS in 1996 that looked good in both Netscape and Explorer. It has spread slowly because designers don't get it, or don't bother to get it.
Designers think spatially, and in grids (well at least those in the Swiss school, but that is very mainstream today). Design is guided by grid lines for columns, margins, picture placement and text sizes. And the grid is based on the leading of the smallest type.
See Lynda Weinman for a quick intro, or buy the book by André Jute. Or, if you can get your hands on it, the original book by Joseph Müller-Brockmann.
Tables are grids. You make an invisible table, and it becomes the structure of your layout. this point is very well demonstrated by Darrell Sano in his book from 1996 that still is very good.
We should have a new standard, a layout grid style sheet. It should let the designer specify a grid, and then point to which box in the grid an element should begin in, and how it is allowed to flow into other boxes from there.
This is the way designers work. If CSS had been designed in collaboration with those who do actual design work, this would have been a more natural solution.
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