There's been a lot of heated discussion going around about CSS lately (or maybe there always is and I just noticed it). I keep reading up on all of it and some of it I can identify with and some of it not. And, in typical blog fashion, figure'd I'd write about it. For the record, I'm a fan of CSS. There are things it has issues with (and it frustrates the hell out of me), but there are lots of things it does well and it has definitely made my life easier. In my opinion, the big problem with CSS (and things like XHTML) is that it isn't easy. It requires a bit more effort to learn about it than it did to learn the basics of HTML enough to throw a page together.
I had a few good things helping me on the way. The biggest of which was a good book. Kynn Bartlett's Teach Yourself CSS in 24 Hours. I'm not real familiar with what other books are out there, but this one helped me a lot. It also did a good job of showing what things work in what browsers. I found that as long as I was careful with what parts of CSS I used things would be relatively cool. Though, I did choose to not support Netscape 4. I know some people don't have a choice, but I do think there's a point where you need to cut the lifeline. And it made my life much easier.
The point of this is that this stuff isn't simple. Should it be? I'm not sure I'm qualified to answer that. But I do know that now that I have all the plumbing in place on my site it's easy to change a lot of how it looks on the fly than it was before. I need to try some of the various editing tools out there to see how well they work. But I think that even without those there's a certain basic level of knowledge that goes with doing anything beyond very very simple markup. And it isn't always easy to find that knowledge amidst everything out there.
