Using CSS for real

What happened?

In the aftermath of spacecaption1999 I finished off its little web site, changing all the text to use the past tense and adding the photo albums donated by Matt and Gideon. Now, in March 2001, I have reformatted it to remove the use of HTML tables to do layout, substituting the use of cascading stylesheets (CSS) and XHTML (HTML 4).

This means that these pages will look their best in a web browser that supports web standards—such as Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 (Windows version) or 5 (Macintosh version), Mozilla 0.7 or later, or Netscape Navigator 6. In browsers that don’t support CSS at all, this site should look like a plain information site—text in your default font on your default background. The lack of table trickery may even make it easier to read on some browsers (screen readers, PDAs, or whatever).

The problem is that the layout may go doolally on web browsers that think they can handle CSS but in fact cannot. This includes Netscape Navigator 4 and Microsoft Internet Explorer versions 3–4. In the ones I have tried, the text is still readable, but the layout is frankly peculiar. You may be better off switching off stylesheet handling altogether (In Navigator, Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Enable Style Sheets; in Internet Explorer, start with View -> Preferences or Tools -> Internet Preferences depending on version).

Why have you done this thing?

The Web Standards Project is trying to encourage people to upgrade to standards-adherent browsers. They outline their reasons there.

I have another reason, apart from wanting to be able to take advantage of the newer standards: by trimming out the verbose HTML trickery I used to use, and rescaling some of the photo-album images, I have shaved almost a megabyte from this section of my site. Since I am limited to 20 Mbytes total, and am currently pushing 18, this is a space saving worth making.

Because the new format is more friendly to screen readers and text-only browsers, I no longer need a special text-only version of pages—which halves the number of HTML files.

I hope this does not cause too much incovenience to readers.

—Damian Cugley