Joshuaink: Is XHTML and CSS easy?

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Is XHTML and CSS easy?

Monday October 17, 2005

That’s it, the question is in the title.

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Matt Robin

1782 days ago

In comparison to what?

Have you hit an xhtml/css obstacle?
(Why am I only answering with questions?! Doh…did it again!)
If..Else

1782 days ago

Yes… relatively speaking, of course.
Elyse

1782 days ago

To understand the basics? Yes. To be good at it and produce the results you want all the time and to be ‘the best of the best’ with it? It’s an artform. Not everyone has the skills. I don’t have the skills. But people can get by off of them.
Jim

1782 days ago

Writing HTML/XHTML documents is easy. Creating a robust, attractive and maintainable website is difficult.

CSS is medium. CSS is much harder than it should be. CSS + browser bugs is very difficult.

Once you’ve learned the 90% of creating a website (HTML/XHTML, CSS, Javascript), you have to learn the other 90% of creating a website (SQL, PHP, XML, source control, server maintenance, Apache configuration, etc).
Jeff Wheeler

1782 days ago

CSS is easy to begin, but quickly begins to get harder once you try to get everything to look the same on all browsers.

xHTML is easy.
Stuart Frisby

1782 days ago

Yeah, compared to programming, Japanese, Space travel and curing medical diseases, it’s a piece of piss. Really though, once you get over the initial learning process, figuring out where things go, and what they do, consolidating it and picking up the advanced stuff is pretty easy.
Geoff Moller

1782 days ago

It’s probably not fair to ask a question regarding the learning curve of client side XHTML and CSS without throwing in at least basic DOM Scripting; you’re not going to do the other two without the 3rd, and there aren’t any dedicated Javascripters out there. They’re either doing the whole client side suite or they are coming up from the backend to help out with the scripting tasks.

Of course this is your site, so you can ask whatever the hell you want :)
Kate Bolin

1782 days ago

No, because if it was, more people would be doing it and we wouldn’t have so many shit websites.

That says to me that while a bunch of us might think it’s dead easy, there are so many people out there who go “Nope. Too hard. Fuck it.”
Kev

1782 days ago

Its easy to produce good and bad sites with XHTML and CSS. They’re just the tools – design is contingent on the designer.

I find it easy to produce more robust solutions to coding problems with XHTML/CSS than I did with attribute-heavy HTML although I initially found the transition difficult.
Chris

1782 days ago

Well, if I can figure it out then it must be pretty easy.

Of course, drawing pictures with crayons is easy too. Drawing incredibly beautiful works of art with crayons is not quite as easy.

As in all things, it’s a matter of degree.

But, the stepping stones, the basics of XHTML/CSS are I think pretty simple to grasp.
Indranil

1782 days ago

Compared to running a hot knife through butter? No, it’s dam hard.
Martin Smith

1782 days ago

The basics of XHTML/CSS are easy. I’ve shown (web design) friends the basic principles of CSS and there is a definate moment of epiphany – a point where you know they will never go back to old methods. It’s from that point that it gets tricky.

XHTML/CSS has many levels of intricacy and various methods of achieving similar results. Knowing the most efficient and robust method for a given project is the clever bit, making that build (relatively) accurate across browsers and platforms is the difficult bit, making your sites accessible is the conscientious bit and being able to achieve all these things whilst maintaining a high standard of visual design is the holy grail achieved by a select few.

So yeah… if you wanna build sites like Roger Johansson, Andy Clarke or that bloke Mr. Oxton then XHTML/CSS is damn difficult!
Sam

1782 days ago

Yes, very easy. The skill is using them to produce something that looks “schweet”
Alistair Holt

1782 days ago

In essence writing XHTML and CSS is easy. As many other people have mentioned in reply to your question, the more advanced elements are where it gets harder, these involve writing efficient, clean and accessible XHTML as well as writing cross-compatible browser CSS.

If you spend the time learning how do things right and you do these things over and over again, it does become very easy.

Some people have mentioned design, but that is a whole different fruit!
Rob Winters

1782 days ago

piss easy.
Drew

1782 days ago

Compared to getting started with presentational tag-soup HTML3.2 or 4, getting started with XHTML and CSS (notably CSS) is very much more difficult.

If you’re already familiar with scripting or programming languages and so are used to getting your head around some of the more abstract things computers do, then XHTML and CSS are pretty trivial. There’s nothing particularly complex in there at all.

I think it comes down not to the complexity of the language (for it’s trivial), but to the ability to make the mental shift and get your head around the logic. That’s something tag soup never required.
Turnip

1782 days ago

The concepts are easy. It’s easy to write XHTML and CSS. However, crafting eloquently marked up and styled sites with a decent design is certainly a skill which takes time and practise. As in, avoiding divmania and tackling rendering bugs is hard.
Olly

1782 days ago

XHTML is a piece of piss.

Simple CSS (font colours and things) are easy. Advanced stuff (page layout and the like) are not so easy.

If every UA behaved the same way, things would be much easier, but that’s another story entirely.
Jens Meiert

1782 days ago

Yes.

Though, this does not mean that you easily understand and know everything of XHTML and CSS, nor does it imply knowledge of all those nice UA specific issues.
AkaXakA

1782 days ago

This sums it up for me:
“To understand the basics? Yes. To be good at it and produce the results you want all the time and to be ‚Äòthe best of the best’ with it? It’s an artform.” – Elyse

However, I do feel I have the skills…
Jeff Croft

1782 days ago

XTHML and CSS generally makes sense and I believe it’s considerably easier to learn from scratch than presentational HTML/table layouts/etc.

That having been said, switching from presentational HTML to XHTML/CSS requires a major shift in thinking, and if you’ve got the presentational HTML method firmly ingrained, the switch will definitely take you some time.

It’s a bit akin to Mac/Windows. Most people agree that OS X is the simpler, easier-to-understand operating system, but if you’ve been using Windows all your life, there’s still going to be a tough transition period—even though Mac is supposedly “easier.”
Max

1782 days ago

It’s easy to do, but very hard to do well.

As goes for several things, of course.
Richard Dunlop-Walters

1781 days ago

To learn, yes. To use, no.
Mat

1781 days ago

Shortest post ever. Fact.
Christian

1781 days ago

Building a basic column design with xHTML and CSS is easy.
Having someone tell you to make a more complex design with details of how it’s supposed to look is a bit harder, but relatively easy.
Making up that complex design yourself with nothing to go on is hard.

It’s all a matter of how it’s used. Sixth Graders can do basic xHTML and CSS, but only seasoned web designers can take most (if not all) table-based designs and turn them into pure xHTML and CSS, knowing the tools at their disposal.
Olly

1781 days ago

What was it they said about Othello? A minute to learn, a lifetime to master. Same thing could be said on this subject :)
Rachel

1781 days ago

don’t you mean ‘ARE xhtml and css easy’? 8)

okay, i’m a nerd. yes.

i don’t think they’re easy, per se, but they’re worth knowing.
Brian

1781 days ago

I suppose one way of looking at it might be that it’s hard enough to consider it work, easy enough to get paid for figuring it out. I’m just happy the robots aren’t here in full force yet ‚Äì my lavish lifestyle is safe for now. ;)
ebits

1781 days ago

Yes, it’s quite easy.

BUT, that’s only if you know general programming principles to begin with. If you don’t then the fact that you need to use a language to create websites will baffle you.

If you knew html and tables, then moving to css and xhtml is a piece of cake; especially if your serious about making a website.
Jason Berry

1781 days ago

I find it easier than tables-based layouts now.

I actually find it hard to think in stupid rows and cells now.
Pierce

1781 days ago

How easy is a piece of string?
Nathan Pitman

1781 days ago

Sometimes.
Anne van Kesteren

1781 days ago

XHTML is hard. HTML is ok. CSS is ok. (In general, I understand all three equally well now.)

By the way, the tabbing order inside this comment form is seriously broken.
Mike Stenhouse

1781 days ago

Yep, CSS and XHTML are dead easy. But… understanding how the various browser manufacturers have decided to implement both technologies is anything but easy. There’s no discernable pattern and there’s no easy way to learn the assorted bugs and workarounds. You just need experience.

It’s only going to get better though. Anyone who’s been doing this for a while will understand my uncontainable joy when Netscape 4 support stopped being a requirement. I’m not even going to start in IE4. Drop IE/Mac too and the remainder are all decent. IE5/PC can normally be accomodated with a few Holly Hacks and for all its faults, IE6 is at least predictable.
cyberhobo

1781 days ago

It’s as easy as painting, or writing, or playing an instrument.
Ben

1781 days ago

HTML is quite easy, I think. The concept of wrapping tags around text for meaningful result is quite simple. Especially since it usually results in a logical change in presentation.

XHTML is actually very difficult, but we don’t notice. If we ever sent XHTML with the correct application/xml+xhtml mime type, a lot of pages would fail due to accidently malformed XML, or unescaped ampersands. Sending it as text/html kills this strict error handling in browsers, of course, but when Microsoft do their implementation (which they’re vowing to ‚Äòdo right’), we’ll see how people (and CMS tools) really cope.

CSS. Hmmm... I’m of the view that in a single column layout, CSS is pretty doable. Margins and padding are purely used (rather than being used to reposition elements), and I think typography, colour and decoration is all pretty doable, often with a syntax reference at hand.

CSS Layout, on the other hand, is more of an art form. Some people reckon that reusing margin, padding and so forth to control positioning is a bit of an abuse, and somewhat unintuitive. Then you have implementation differences (Mozilla using padding for list indents, IE using margin).
It’s much harder to comprehend and I think there is an awful lot of ‚Äòtweaking’ happens when you’re doing layout. It doesn’t take long, and we take it for granted, but before you know the little hacks and ‚Äòalternative ways of doing the same thing’, it sounds rather difficult.

Long term, I think CSS will get a new positioning/layout module that’s more robust. But someone needs to think of an appropriate syntax first (ideas on a postcard to the CSS Working Group mailing list, search first please).

CSS3 does a lot to make designs more flexible (you can define a 3 column layout when the canvas width is greater than 800 pixels, but then rearrange things when it’s less than that). We’ll still be using the same kinds of position: models, though.

Then again, maybe a less buggy Internet Explorer will be enough to alleviate the headaches.
Olly

1781 days ago

They’re easy once you know how.

How many different answers will I leave on this one? ;-)
Filip

1781 days ago

In my opinion, it’s easy to create a basic site, harder to create a standards-compliant site, very hard to create a standards-compliant, user-friendly and accessible site.
J??rgen Arnor G?•rds?? Lom

1781 days ago

It’s like painting, I think – it’’s easy, but without the skills, it always wind up looking crap. And yes, it is an artform.
Ryan

1781 days ago

I agree with Ben. Internet Explorer et al. do not support the application/xml+xhtml content type, so you have to do some degree of content negotiation. Additionally, there are many differences with the DOM when a page is sent as application/xml+xhtml. document.write for instance, is no longer available. Writing javascript that works with both DOMs can be a chore.
Veracon

1781 days ago

XHTML and CSS: Yes.
Actually coding semantically: No.

Jim

Christian

Jason Berry

Veracon

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