Time to Learn CSS

By now you've probably all heard of "AJAX" or maybe the more general term "Rich Internet Applications."  Rather than dive into the acronyms, all of these things are the just the latest way to do "cool stuff on the web" from the mundane, such as "click to enlarge" link for an image that doesn't have to launch a pop-up window any more, to something pretty neat, like dragging part of the page over to the other side and dropping it there. These capabilities are cropping up everywhere thanks to nifty toolkits like DoJo, GWT and others.

In fact, in the latest release of Percussion Rhythmyx (6.5), we used the DoJo Toolkit to really improve the Active Assembly experience.  You can drag and drop content around on pages, edit fields without pop-ups in many cases, and just generally enjoy a richer user experience without any applets required.

There is, however, a bit of catch to all this great Web innovation -- CSS.  To an old SGMLer like me, CSS is nothing but a harmless file listing a bunch of formatting styles.  For many of you, it may be something only your design team ever cared about.  You could be anal about managing styles or not, but it wouldn't really matter that much.  Just tweak it a bit later and move on till things look right.

Not any more. All that AJAX stuff that's out there everywhere, ALL uses CSS to control the placement and look and feel of their cool new capabilities.  Want a cool site overlay view from your Web analytics solution?  Your CSS will matter.  Want to build a mashup between your site and someone else's?  Your CSS will matter.   Want to use the cool new drag and drop in Active Assembly?  Your CSS will matter.  Even more importantly, if you use a lot of these technologies on your site, you're going to have many "CSS cooks in the kitchen" and need to make sure it doesn't ruin your Web stew.

Thankfully, CSS is NOT some arcane programming language, nor does it mean you have to go and hire some guru of the black arts to help.  CSS is pretty much still just a "a list of styles" typically sitting in a file somewhere (ok, there's a bit more to it than that).  What you do have to do, is stop treating it like an afterthought, or graphic design step.  Get your developers trained on CSS, make sure they at least understand how the cascade rules work, and what tools to use to manage and debug CSS effects on pages (we particularly like FireBug).  Or maybe just sit your developers down with the graphic designer for an afternoon, it'll be good for them to explore their hidden creative side for a while.

CSS is not that hard, but it is probably something many have ignored up to now.  With so many new and cool things out there to incorporate into your site, there's no excuse for anyone on a Web team to ignore it any more.