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Do CSS designers ** upfront ** prevent layouts that CSS can handle?

By asking this question How to get to CSS zen? , I now understand that the problems that I have are mainly related to positioning. I found several articles telling that CSS is not always good enough as a layout system.

Do you, as CSS developers, limit yourself to upfront projects that can handle CSS? Should I avoid things that seem completely lightweight are actually hard to do with CSS?

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Of course, you are limiting yourself. As a designer, you should always think about the environment with which you work. If I were developing an ad in a magazine, I would not have thought about animation or video. There are certain rules that you must adhere to, and it makes no sense to ignore this.

But, of course, the rules have always been broken .

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Why?

If you are “designing,” why should you limit yourself to limiting one technology? When you design your site, you should always try to achieve the most convenient user interface.

If you limit yourself, then you just ask that the site is not used, and then what is the point of creating it?

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I do not limit myself to developments that can handle CSS (within reasonable limits), just define your design, and it will be possible that you can get it right using CSS, but this can be associated with a lot of hair pulling, especially if IE6 is involved !

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When implementing web design (provided that I have an image / drawing of how the site will look), I always perform the following actions:

  • I look at the design and determine what components it has. Examples are navigation areas, headings, content areas, etc.
  • I implement (X) HTML, which can represent areas of content without regard to design (there are certain things, such as the order of the content that I use to define the design).
  • I'm starting to make the CSS and images necessary to make the site look the same as in the original project document. Depending on the complexity of the design, I could refuse the elements that need to be used to stylize the page, and can lead to the addition of elements that actually do not make sense for the content. I try to avoid it as much as possible, but I try to create elements so that they do not impose content.

As you can see, I never limit design to CSS. CSS last. Now, depending on the complexity of the design, it may not look the same as in the original project document, but the goal is always to make it as identical as possible, while maintaining clean HTML code so that the project is easily updated in the future.

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Most of the layouts that I find can be done using CSS. There are very few exceptions (this usually applies to text with text centered).

For me, the main factor limiting my projects is the reluctance to use huge background images. If the effect cannot be accomplished by combining / repeating a few tiny bg images, I tend to reject them or adjust them. For example, a diagonal gradient on a box with curved corners, which can be of any height, can fall into this category using CSS2.1

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Almost every artist is limited to drawing on canvas, almost every sculptor makes 3D forms of stone or clay or metal ...

But there are those who dream of new dreams and create new things. On the flop, some brilliance.

Should you limit yourself to what CSS can do with layouts? Not completely. I say a big dream.

As soon as you have your dream design, either figure out how to create it, find a technology other than CSS that can do this, or start inventing!

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You can do absolutely anything using CSS 2.1 compared to layout. Its a total pain in the ass that has no reason to ever exist, but you can do rounded corners (using background images), gradient backgrounds (more background images) and all kinds of other bloated shit that you don't need all together and still not completely destroy the semantics of your HTML.

Doing all this garbage and still trying to be standards-compliant reduces usability because its designers need round corners and other frivolous crap, not users. Usability tests have confirmed this. Sites that are bloated to provide presentation and usability through semantics and effective failure in usability tests compared to their competitors. I work on a site that receives several million visitors a day, and I saw the results of our usability tests.

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CSS provides a very good way to create a general design that can easily be modified with small changes in a single CSS file and instantly apply design changes to all of your pages. Of course, there are things that are difficult to do with CSS, and in such cases you may want to do it differently, but even if your layout is mainly CSS based, it doesn’t mean that you cannot do some special parts using other technologies ! You can mix!

This way you don’t limit yourself when you go to CSS. You simply use powerful technology that can be used in perfect harmony along with others!

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