[kjhughes]

This and other utility and howto sites are very helpful, agreed.

BTW, to hone your CSS skills, try dropping into Firebug or Chrome's developer tools and just playing around -- very easy way to learn and get CSS stuff done. The CSS panel lets you change rules and values and see the effects immediately. I know in Chrome I use the up/down arrows on a value to slide objects and spacing around on the screen regularly. The panel also helps greatly in understanding cascading; see also the "computed styles" section.

[freditup]

Yup, I suck at CSS too. I still think there's something fundamentally wrong with it, but that's probably more a marker on my own ignorance than anything.

Anyway, I do have fun playing around with the FF style tools. It is quite cool and informative.

[davegauer]

CSS was clearly designed with typography and text layout in mind - and it works wonderfully for that purpose. But it was not created flexibly enough to be well suited for anything else. You CAN make graphical interfaces with it (and we do, because we have to). But it's all hacks.

I think the browser inconsistencies are as frustrating as they are because doing seemingly "simple" things in CSS requires using advanced CSS features in boundary-pushing ways (this wonderful arrow box app is a perfect example). Browser support has to be EXCELLENT before certain simple layout things are even possible. Imagine a CSS that supported things like "vertical-align: center". That's a CSS that wouldn't NEED to have its boundaries pushed to the limits and the rough edges of browsers wouldn't rankle nearly so much.

It never ceases to amaze me how quickly people jump to defend CSS as if any criticisms imply that the author thinks we'd be better off back in the days of deeply nested tables. But the sad fact of the matter is that some things really were easier and more dependable (and in some cases, WAY more so) with tables.

[haberman]

> It never ceases to amaze me how quickly people jump to defend CSS as if any criticisms imply that the author thinks we'd be better off back in the days of deeply nested tables.

Could not agree more. Tech people are weird sometimes.

The same thing repeats itself in other contexts; for example people hate to hear criticism of git, because to many people it is the be-all-end-all of version control. But just because it's better than what came before doesn't mean there's not room to improve it even further.

[freditup]

Late reply, but that's how I feel somewhat. I feel like CSS isn't intuitive at all for an application layout. I've done layouts in other markup languages and had a blast, but when I hit HTML and CSS, I just feel generally confused. Again, I hardly ever do web design, so it could just be ignorance on my part, but I still feel CSS could use a makeover instead of incremental changes.

[richardlblair]

I personally don't have an issue with CSS. The issue for me is the inconsistent implementations across browsers. That has been my real pain point, and it continues to keep me away from really learning CSS.

[freditup]

It just seems like there could be a simpler system to me. (Simpler in terms of properties and such, as opposed to syntax. Also, variables and stuff in CSS would be nice obviously). But I agree, inconsistency is always frustrating.