Grauw’s blog

The reasons behind CSS FAQ

June 30th, 2005

Recently there have been a number of doubts on the www-style CSS discussion list about why things were done the way they are in CSS. I have attempted to create a FAQ which addresses those kind of questions.

» The www-style CSS FAQ

Hopefully this document will give some insight in why things are the way they are in CSS. It should also give people a place to point to when they have to explain something that has already been explained before.

I aim to keep it updated, adding new items as I see questions asked and answered, and links to the relevant discussion threads and information.

If there are any more questions you think are suitable for answering in this document, I will gladly hear them.

Update: The FAQ has been renamed and updated (2005-07-12).

Grauw

Comments

Iiiiinteresting by Ryan Brooks at 2005-07-01 00:02

That is something that is sure to answer a lot of questions for a lot of people... Definately Bookmark worthy.

Here’s an idea by Ryan Brooks at 2005-07-06 23:22

Why don’t we get one of these, but as opposed to developers, how about business owners – i.e. the advantages of CSS versus traditional table based layouts...

Yeah... by Grauw at 2005-07-07 00:31

Yeah, of course that is a good idea. But I think it is likely various such resources already exist, because that is about CSS advocacy and there are a great many people who very much like to do that (and rightly so, because CSS is great! ^_^).

By the way, I think that a lot of work has already been done in that area, and by now pretty much everyone realises the advantages of using CSS, and newly created sites are commonly based on HTML + CSS (but maybe I’m looking through pink glasses :)).

The reason for creating this FAQ was that on the www-style list a number of discussions and ideas took place which were not informed about certain aspects and limitations to the design of CSS, and why things were done in a certain way. As there is not really a W3C resource containing that information, I decided to gather my knowledge about it in a FAQ.