Remember when CSS was new and we all wanted to create lighter-than-air pure CSS websites? It seems like only yesterday. Browser quirks and complex flashy interfaces put an end to those dreams, at least in the realm of corporate and most business sites. CSS is far from finished, though. Here’s a link to a list of CSS Design award winners, many of them business sites:
http://www.cssdesignawards.com/
I like to use CSS as much as possible, especially when I discover special creative useful CSS. I use CSS for my 3-column expandable-width site layout (e.g., my bobzeen site). I use the once-semi-famous expandable-rounded-box left-nav menu, which auto-adjusts height when you insert more menu items (orange left-nav on my bobzeen site). I put a clever-plus-useful CSS-method top-menu layout that looks sort of like a hoverable tab menu (top nav on my resume site). Last and latest but not least, I put the awesome loveable hoverable CSS world map ( on my bobzeen homepage), for which fine piece of CSS scripting I give credit to the author, Jarod Taylor.
It would be nice if we lived in a world of pure CSS, but RL is laced with disappointments, boundaries, and exceptions. We confront bourgeois banalities like javascript and the egregious gratuities of ajax. It reminds me of the early film-art era devolving into formulaic Hollywood movies. Today website art is devolving into flashy UX entertainment.
Maybe I’m over analogizing/eulogizing/elegizing. After all, what’s the point of single-minded CSS when there’s so much more you can add to the mix for more complex, exciting features and functionality?
Still, one hangs on. Complexity has many faces. A page of sparse articulate code wrapped in flowing CSS, imbued with clean, bright lines of stylsheet magic, produces a pure lighter-than-air weblife that we all dream about and want for our children. My hope for today is to revisit the power of CSS and the aesthetic web to build a better web page, and a better tomorrow.